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EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



DEMOCRACY'S 
HIGH SCHOOL 

BY 

WILLIAM D. LEWIS 

PRINCIPAL OF THE WILLIAM PENN HIGH SCHOOL 
PHILADELPHIA 




HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 

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COPYRIGHT, I914, BY WILLIAM D. LEWIS 
ALL RIGHTS KESERVED 



The author acknowledges the courteous per- 
mission of the editors of "The Outlook" and 
" The Saturday Evening Post " to reprint arti- 
cles which have appeared in the columns of 
these periodicals. 



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CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



SEP -8 1914 



5CI.A379383 



FOREWORD 

In February, 19 13, I chanced to read three 
articles on the American high school which at 
once impressed me with their social insight. I 
asked their author, Principal William D. Lewis, 
of the William Penn High School, Philadelphia, 
to call on me. His enthusiastic vision of the im- 
mense possibilities for real democratic service to 
be performed by the public high schools of the 
country led me to say in The Outlook: " Every 
man and woman interested in boys and girls — ■ 
and what man or woman is not? — ought to read 
what Principal Lewis himself says; for no brief 
sketch of mine will do even the remotest justice 
to the way in which he grips and expounds the 
vital need of our high school and college educa- 
tion — the need that it shall relate to life, and 
shall offer to each divergent soul the chance that 
soul needs to train itself, along its own lines, for 
useful citizenship, domestic and public, in this 
great seething, straining democracy of ours." 

I am glad that in the present volume Mr. Lewis 
has amplified the articles that I first read, and that 
iii 



FOREWORD 

he has added others so as to express his pedagogi- 
cal and social creed more fully. The vital thing 
about this book is that it shows just where the 
high schools which the American people are sup- 
porting can render a far larger service than the 
i mere inculcation of knowledge. It presents the 
problem of the school from the point of view of 
the boy and girl rather than from that of the sub- 
ject, and shows how completely this change in 
viewpoint transforms our traditional thought of 
the school. 

The fact that this book appears in a series 
devoted to pedagogy ought not to limit its read- 
ers to the teaching profession. It is of most inter- 
est to the average plain citizen who thinks of the 
future, and who is anxious that the activities 
through which the collective and cooperative 
forces of society find expression shall give their 
largest possible service. 

Our progress in educational efficiency must 
come from two sources: from the great natural 
leader who happens to be an educator, and from 
the ordinary citizen who to common sense adds 
some power of vision, and who realizes the rela- 
tion of the school to society. In pedagogy as in 
every other walk of life great natural leaders are 
scarce. Therefore the ordinary citizen of vision 
iv, 



FOREWORD 

and common sense must concern himself with the 
changing problem of the school, and must insist 
that pedantic tradition does not keep our schools 
from performing their full public service. Neither 
pedagogue nor citizen can fail to gain from Mr. 
Lewis's discussion a clearer vision of the place the 
school must fill in solving our great democratic 
problems if these are to be solved aright. 

Theodore Roosevelt. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/democracyshighscOOIewi 



CONTENTS 



Editor's Introduction 

I. A Social View of the High School 
II. The High School and the Boy . . 

III. The High School and the Girl . . 

IV. The High School and the College 
V. The Administration of the Course of Study 109 

Outline 127 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

For more than a century we have been trying to 
make our school system more democratic, which 
is merely to say that we have been striving to 
equalize educational opportunity in America. 

At first the chief problem lay in cheapening the 
cost of education to the individual child. In the 
fulfillment of this program, schools were every- 
where established so as to be ready of access. 
Rate bills for instruction were abolished. Em- 
ployers of children and exploiting parents were 
restrained, by compulsory school attendance acts, 
from depriving youth of its educational opportu- 
nity. Institutions for higher training were also 
established by the state, — high schools, colleges, 
and universities. Thus schools of every grade 
were made available to the poor as to the rich. 
If one had the requisite ambition he could find 
everywhere open public schools. Mental ability 
and economic pressure seemed to be limiting con- 
ditions only beyond the elementary school. 

But it was soon discovered that the privilege of 
education was more apparent than real. It is one 
thing to find free entrance into a public school 
ix 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

and it is another to profit by attendance therein. 
The fact was that the schools offered so little to 
some children that they were not even brought 
to school. As traditionally organized, ordinary 
school teaching could not do much for the blind, 
the deaf-mutes, and the feeble-minded. They 
were in effect left out of the scheme of public 
education, though the boast had been made that 
there was a school open for every child in 
America. The struggle has been to make the 
boast real. Soon, through special administration 
and special methods of instruction, these unfortu- 
nates really received an education in special 
schools. Next the schoolmaster passed to another 
though less unfortunate group who were the 
incomplete failures of the public schools — to the 
backward, the anaemic, the delinquent, the crip- 
pled, and the foreign. These, too, needed some 
particular care that education might do for them 
what had been promised. Special classes were 
organized for them alongside of the regular 
grades. And last, the educator's scrutiny came 
to that vast group which we had long called 
" average children." Here the statistics of school 
attendance revealed the tragedies of school elim- 
ination and school retardation. This great mass 
x 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

of undefective children proved not to be homoge- 
neous ; they presented a wide variation in degree 
and type of mind which had not been adequately 
taken into account. These, too, had to have some 
special consideration. It was given. Every ex- 
pansion of the courses of study and the meth- 
ods of teaching in the regular grade classrooms 
is an attempt to reach some previously neglected 
ability or interest. The organization of the junior 
high school for those who are at complete ease in 
the traditional school, and the establishment of 
pre- vocational intermediate schools for those who 
usually leave school at the fifth or sixth school 
year, are simply the last special efforts of the 
administrator to fit the lower reaches of the school 
system to the varying needs of human beings. 

The cheapening and the popularizing of ele- 
mentary education have had one effect bearing 
large consequences for higher education. They 
have deposited at the doors of the high school a 
mass of boys and girls, larger in number and more 
divergent in ability than any group it has ever 
handled before. Following a long-sanctified cus- 
tom, the high school immediately proceeded to 
pick and choose those who would fit its tradi- 
tional standards, rejecting all those whose domi- 
xi 



EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 

nant needs it scorned to serve. But the pile of 
human beings scrapped by the high school be- 
came so large as to attract attention. The right 
of high schools to be so highly and so narrowly 
selective was questioned. In the face of protest 
and even revolt, the high school had to change. 
Like the elementary school of two decades ago, it 
began to modify the spirit of its administration, 
to expand its curriculum, and to change its 
methods of instruction, so that every kind of 
mind and every degree of ability might find its 
chance for extended intellectual growth in the 
new opportunities and encouragements of a 
modern and democratic school. 

The nature of the present-day movement to 
democratize our high schools may be best under- 
stood by a consideration of the typical cases of 
personal and social failure with which these schools 
must be charged and by a statement of those 
newer policies which are designed to substitute 
a broad teaching efficiency for a narrow academic 
tradition. These are here presented by the thor- 
oughly socialized master of a great municipal sec- 
ondary school, whose experiences and experiments 
afford concrete evidence of the soundness of his 
conception of a modern democratic high school. 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 



A SOCIAL VIEW OF THE HIGH SCHOOL 

The irrepressible conflict between progress and 
tradition has at last reached the American high 
school. For years there has been a steadily in- 
creasing dissatisfaction with the results of a 
course of study of almost exclusively academic 
content that sent from the school as failures 
many of the pupils, particularly boys, who either 
could not or would not apply themselves to a 
curriculum consisting mainly of memorizing text- 
books. This curriculum has failed to enlist the 
interest of motor-minded pupils because its re- 
lation to their lives was at best uncertain and 
remote. The unrest of the boys and girls, once 
attributed to youthful perversity, has at last 
found a response in public sentiment. 

The awakened civic consciousness of the nation 
has tended to emphasize popular discontent with 
the high school. In a half-articulate way the 
public has known that the fundamental reason 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

for the annual expenditure of approximately a 
half-billion of dollars for schools is the produc- 
tion of a better citizenship than could be had 
without that expense. Along with the scrutiny 
of our other institutions has come the insistent 
question, "Are our high schools producing this 
improved citizenship ?" 

Then, too, there has come a half-conscious 
recognition of the individualistic aim of the 
purely academic school, and of its pedagogical 
shortcomings, as well as of its non-social ideals as 
measured by the new conception of public serv- 
ice. The boy who remained in the school only 
a short time often carried into the practical 
affairs of life no superiority in efficiency over the 
grammar school graduate. Indeed, his year or 
two of perfunctory compliance in an order of life 
that never really gripped him had frequently 
developed a habitual lassitude that had to be 
overcome by a series of convulsive jolts that the 
world of affairs knows only too well how to give. 
The boy who entered practical life after complet- 
ing the high school course found that his four 
years had given him little that was useful, — not 
even a mastery of direct, forceful English, — 
although it had given him a beclouded haze 
of Latin endings, ad-ante-con's, and a jumble 
2 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

of physically impossible German genders. This 
haze rapidly evaporated into thin air and became 
a part of the culture which consists of the things 
we have forgotten. About all the graduate really 
had was a residuum of "mental discipline" 
which at its best functioned in a habitual per- 
sistence. On the other hand, habits detrimental 
to both culture and discipline were often formed, 
if we are to believe Professor Paul Hanus, who 
says: "During the school period aversion and 
evasion are more frequently cultivated than 
power and skill through the forced pursuit of 
permanently uninteresting subjects — subjects 
for which the learner has no capacity. When 
that does not happen, the pernicious habit of 
being satisfied with inadequate or partial 
achievement is very likely to be the result. In 
neither case does the individual develop his real 
capacity, nor does he acquire right habits." 1 

The boy who went to college from the high 
school was practically always lost to the home 
community. He swelled the already plethoric 
ranks of the "learned professions" or moved to 
the large cities. He seemed to be the only one 
the course of study really fitted, yet it was a 
question whether either he or the community 
1 Educational Aims and Educational Values, p. n. 
3 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

had profited by the expensive gift bestowed upon 
him. 

If the service of the school to the boys was 
vague and uncertain, its practical value to the 
great mass of girls approached absolute zero. It 
has long been evident that the girl who is gradu- 
ated from the traditional high school is neither 
better fitted thereby for the duties of a wife, 
home-maker, and mother, nor efficiently trained 
to meet the practical problem of self-support. 
Society, therefore, is beginning to see that her 
education is very often a mistake both for 
itself and for the girl. 

The recognition of the shortcomings of our 
individualistic social philosophy has made many 
people look at our schools from an entirely new 
point of view. Within the last few years our 
national life has become excessively complicated. 
The cost of living has perhaps nearly doubled. 
Enormous aggregations of capital have practi- 
cally assumed the functions of government 
through their alliance with political systems. 
Justice against "malefactors of great wealth" 
has become increasingly difficult to secure because 
of their command of the best legal talent, the 
emphasis of our jurisprudence upon property 
rights, and the extreme technicality of American 
4 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

legal procedure. Class lines have become more 
and more closely drawn, with property rather 
than birth as the mark of distinction. For these 
and many other similar reasons the American 
people — rarely the American pedagogues — ■ 
have begun to see that the task of the one com- 
pletely socialized agency for human betterment 
is not to give the brilliant John and Henry 
advantages over the phlegmatic James and Tom, 
but to give to each the type of training mosW 
likely to enable him to become the most intelli- 
gent, conscientious, and efficient citizen possible 4 
with his mental and physical endowments and 
limitations. The community — big and little — 
has become wisely selfish in recognizing in its 
schools not a philanthropy but a cooperative 
agency for social service. 

It is a platitude that young people get their 
adjustment to the social order during the period 
of adolescence, which coincides roughly with the 
high school years. During this time they awaken 
to new interests and assume new responsibilities, 
change again and again their point of view, form 
their life purposes, formulate their standards for 
judging people and institutions, establish their 
ideals, and determine their various personalities 
by the thoughts that man thinketh in his heart. 

5 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

During these years, then, will be decided their 
attitude toward society. If they emerge from 
the high school with an indifferent, selfish, laissez- 
faire philosophy, they will become either the 
unthinking victims or the plunderers of our devil- 
take-the-hindmost social order. 

Evidently there are two ways in which the 
boys and girls in the high schools can be trained 
in citizenship and in right social thinking — 
first, through the curriculum, and second, 
through participation in the organization and 
management of the school as a social unit. 

The school can contribute to the intelligence of 
its rising citizenship by drawing directly upon 
that large fund of present-day social, political, 
and economic knowledge that has made the low- 
priced magazine the tremendous power it has 
become in our national life within the last fifteen 
years. Underlying the lurid exaggerations of the 
muckraker there has been a foundation of fact 
without which his attacks would have been of 
interest mainly to the courts that railroaded him 
to prison. 

That it may contribute to real civic intelligence 
the school, away down in the elementary grades, 
should begin to teach the nature of the coopera- 
tive functions of society. For example, the pupils 
6 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

should learn in a simple way the functions of the 
policeman, the fireman, the street-cleaner. They 
should understand that the streets belong to the 
people and that they are loaned in part to transit 
companies, and to telegraph, telephone, lighting, 
and water companies. They should see the public 
nature of these corporations; should know that 
in many communities these functions are exer- 
cised directly by the people as represented by 
their government. As they come into the ad- 
vanced grades of the grammar school, they 
should learn about the abuses against which the 
people must defend their own interests. The 
alliance between corrupt public officials and 
public-service corporations should be shown up 
as a conspiracy against public welfare that 
affects directly the comfort and prosperity of 
every citizen. 

All study of civics, history, and other forms of 
social science should clarify the pupils' under- 
standing of the social forces and problems of his 
immediate environment. For example, civics, 
instead of studying governmental organization 
beginning with the Constitution of the United 
States, should begin with community functions 
in District Number Ten or the Nineteenth Ward. 
The constitution is complicated, abstract, remote, 
7 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

uninteresting. The community functions of the 
neighborhood, village, ward, and city are con- 
crete, simple, immediate, and personal. They 
explain a thousand experiences that have been 
unintelligible and furnish the pupil a point of 
contact with the conversation of his elders, the 
comments of the newspapers, and the discussions 
in the magazines. Moreover, this approach to 
the study of civics leads immediately and inevi- 
tably to the larger social problems with which the 
citizen must be familiar if he is to be a helpful 
and useful community asset. 

From this type of instruction it is a simple step 
to an understanding of the great national ques- 
tions that are claiming the serious thought of 
every patriot. The trusts, the bosses, — big and 
little, — the control of legislation through caucus 
rule, and the influence upon the big leaders by 
the "interests," capital and labor, social legis- 
lation, lobbies, — legitimate and otherwise, — 
all of these and hundreds of other questions are 
vital to the civilization we are building. Our 
young people must understand this, because 
under a despotism the government may be 
better than the sum total of the citizenship, 
while under a democracy the government may be 
worse but can never be better. This is the fun- 
8 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

damental reason for our expensive public school 
system. 

All around us are concrete problems whose 
study cannot fail to promote the right attitude 
of mind on the part of the pupils. To cite a few 
examples, our boys and girls in the high schools 
could with great interest and profit study the 
housing conditions in the poorer parts of the city, 
the effects of child labor, family budgets for 
various incomes. They could in a more or less 
anonymous way analyze their own family ex- 
penses and the cost and profit elements of com- 
modity prices, and their periodic advances, such 
as the recent twenty-five cents a ton on coal and 
last week's two cents a pound on meat. They 
could learn to use the tables of the reports of the 
Census Bureau and of the various departments 
of the Government. They could vitalize their 
physiology and hygiene by the examination of 
bakeshops, markets, restaurants, and hotels. 
They could profitably as young citizens acquaint 
themselves with the actual problems of local 
government. The peering eyes of a few thousand 
high-school-boy investigators from all classes of 
the community might often discover the snake- 
trails of public dishonesty. But the prevention of 
graft would be only a by-product. The social 
9 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

thinking and the standards of community right- 
eousness would be tremendously improved, not 
only in the future voters in school, but also in 
their parents and older associates. 

Nor would the aroused public spirit of youth 
fail in its interest in national affairs. Their 
debating clubs would echo a real interest in the 
problems of control or ownership of natural mo- 
nopolies. Problems like the tariff, "pork-barrel" 
appropriations, pension frauds, conservation, 
irrigation, woman suffrage, initiative, referen- 
dum, and recall will be the more readily under- 
stood by those who have become accustomed to 
think in terms of community welfare as applied to 
their immediate environment; and the spirit of 
patriotic devotion to the public service that is 
being evidenced by the present aggressive fight 
for righteous government will awaken enthusi- 
astic response from them because of their knowl- 
edge of conditions. 

No less valuable for training in citizenship 
than this study of present-day civic, social, and 
economic life is the study of history from the 
modern social point of view. Here again, how- 
ever, there must come a revolution in our tradi- 
tional method. Go into a history class in almost 
any high school and what do you find? Ancient 
10 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

history — fact after fact painfully recited from 
a book; hear pupils parrot off details about 
cuneiform writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the 
wars of the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, the 
struggles between Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, 
the organization of the Roman State, — the 
comitia curiata, the comitia centuriata ; see their 
diagrams of a Roman camp, and listen to their 
minute description of the Greek phalanx and the 
Roman legion; follow the details of the Punic 
wars; listen to the facts about Rome's far-flung 
dominion, the fact of its internecine strife, the 
fact of its change to an empire, the fact of its fall 
before the Goths and Vandals. In all this you 
will listen in vain for a single word of application 
of these multitudinous facts to conditions of 
to-day; you will hear none of the obvious paral- 
lelism between the causes that overthrew the 
Roman State and those that threaten the integ- 
rity of our own institutions. Here are a few 
examples of the applications that could be made. 
In the last two centuries of the Roman Empire 
the population gathered rapidly into cities, huge 
accumulations of wealth promoted class distinc- 
tions and hatred between rich and poor, mar- 
riages became relatively fewer and the birth-rate 
rapidly declined, the land came into the hands of 
ii 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

large proprietors, and the former landowners 
either became serfs or moved to the cities; in the 
cities independent business was largely monopo- 
lized by the very wealthy, who hired the former 
small merchants. Divorce became easy, religion 
lost its compelling power, morals were corrupted. 
Does this sound like a summary from a muck- 
raking magazine? At least we may congratulate 
the Romans who fell before the rude invaders of 
the German forests that they did not have the 
abuses of stock-gambling, the coal trust, the food 
trust, or the tariff, juggled back and forth by 
partisan politics and local interests. 

Suppose, now, we come at our Roman history 
from the modern viewpoint. Shall we not see in 
the Gracchi the sturdy fighters for the people's 
rights in our public life to-day? Shall we not 
recognize in Julius Caesar the most consummate, 
even if the most patriotic of bosses? Shall we 
not discover in the agrarian troubles the twen- 
tieth-century fight for public control of natural 
monopolies? May we not hope to see our servile 
wars fought and won with the ballot, and a gov- 
ernment for and by the people emerge instead 
of the rule of a Nero of high finance or a riot of 
demagogic confiscation and proscription? 
f Shall we study history for history's sake or for 
12 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

our own sake — for the sake of our social and 
economic welfare? History is no museum of 
antiquities. It is a storehouse of political wisdom 
for him who will take the trouble to understand. 
Every boy and girl in our schools can be made to 
interpret the past in terms of the present and 
the present in terms of the past and to take an 
intense delight in the process as soon as our 
schools really discover why they should teach 
history. The aim of our whole history-and- 
politics group of studies should be to put an 
enacting clause into our present complacent 
assumption that the American voter knows 
something about the vital issues that he is called 
upon to determine with his ballot. 

The high school can hasten the process of 
social thinking in other ways, however. Its 
institutional democracy can become a habit of 
life in the youths who are just forming their life 
habits. To this end it must first abolish every 
kind of snobbish society and fraternity. Here is 
a case that is typical of their working. 

Mazie was the daughter of a mill foreman who 
had the American faith in an education. This 
faith, we ought to observe, was pretty much all 
based on a blind belief that somehow an educa- 
tion would enable his girl to have an easier time 

13 



• 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

than had fallen to the lot of her father and 
mother. He loved Mazie and was glad to sacrifice 
for her. The girl entered the high school, and at 
first was dazed and then charmed by the fine 
equipment, the systematic organization, the new 
studies, and the crowds of strangers all intent 
upon a variety of interests novel to her. After 
a month or two, however, Mazie began to be 
aware that she was not "in it." Friends of the 
grammar-school days dropped her. New ac- 
quaintances suddenly became absorbed in other 
friends. She heard rumors of secret societies and 
fraternities and saw former companions wearing 
the mystic badges. When she made advances to 
these girls she was repelled with those sly, covert, 
cattish jabs by which the daughters of Eve time 
out of mind have vented their disapproval. 
Mazie did not tell even her mother why she left 
school; but her soul was scarred and hardened, 
and she was not helped along the road toward 
culture. Were the members of the societies and 
fraternities? 

Mazie's experience illustrates the social train- 
ing of the wrong kind that is going on in thou- 
sands of American high schools. The school 
fraternity and many of the exclusive literary 
societies are efficient schools of snobbery. Often 
14 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

they are worse. A certain fraternity in one high 
school was an example only a little worse in 
degree than hundreds of chapters all over the 
country. By confession of its members gambling, 
drunkenness, and even worse evils were incidental 
to the free access to private rooms by a group 
of boys too young to exercise proper self-control. 
When a boy began to show an indifferent attitude 
toward his work and an insolent arrogance toward 
authority, the teachers of that school always knew 
that he was being " rushed" by this fraternity. 

The worst feature of the high school "frat" is 
the rooms. At best they become loafing-places 
and schools of cards and smoking. At worst they 
become schools of vice as dangerous as Fagin's. 
Here the ex-member who has time to loaf has 
an opportunity to teach to younger boys the evils 
that his leisure has learned. Freed as these rooms 
are from all effectual supervision, even if parents 
or teachers are invited to come, they foster snob- 
bishness, loafing, and insubordination, if not 
gambling, drunkenness, and licentiousness. 

Then the high school in its organization and 
discipline can teach the necessity of social think- 
ing by means of the common interests of the 
school. Athletics, school publications, the lunch- 
room, and, in skillful hands, a large share of the 
i5 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

school discipline can be made daily object- 
lessons in social cooperation. Formal plans, such 
as the school city, have often failed in high schools 
because they were substituted ex cathedra for the 
benevolent despotisms almost universal in school 
management. The history of such experiments 
often bears a close analogy to that of the Central 
American republics. But the valuable part of 
any such plan is the spirit of democracy and social 
cooperation at its basis; and this can be secured 
gradually, either with or without any formal 
organization. 

Even the ex-cathedra type of social cooperation 
will work if the principal and the faculty of the 
school enjoy the confidence of the student body. 
Recently the school board of an Eastern city 
decreed, without consulting the principal, that 
the study rooms of the high school should be 
placed on a self-governing basis, and that all 
teachers should be withdrawn the following 
Monday. For a few days chaos reigned. Then 
the principal placed the problem fairly before 
the pupils. " There are to be no teachers in the 
study halls, " said he. "Some of you want to do 
your work : you will have to see that disturbances 
cease. " They ceased, and the pupils incidentally 
learned a valuable lesson in social cooperation. 
16 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

In a certain high school the athletics and the 
school paper had fallen into the hands of a gang 
of grafters who were following Tammany meth- 
ods of political bossism for individual profit. 
The principal got the facts and showed up the 
whole practice to the school. A new organization 
was effected, and money that had formerly gone 
for graft was put into decorations for the building. 
In a couple of years over twelve hundred dollars 
were thus spent. 

In another school a reception was given to the 
wife of the Governor of the State. Numerous 
pageants, pantomimes, and allegories were given, 
every one of them originated, costumed, and 
executed by the pupils, with only advisory aid 
from the faculty. In another a May fete, con- 
sisting of songs, drills, dances, pageants, and 
scenes from plays, was carried on almost wholly 
by student initiative and administration. In this 
school there are twenty clubs, including current- 
events, social-service, dramatic, camera, student- 
welfare, lend-a-hand, besides those devoted to the 
various subjects of study. All these various activ- 
ities, from the quelling of the disorder in the study 
rooms in the first school to the democratic clubs 
last mentioned, have been carried on by the pupils 
— often in response to faculty suggestion, to be 

17 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

sure, but always with a rich result in practical 
community cooperation. Illustrations might be 
indefinitely multiplied from the best schools in 
the country. It is notable that wherever these 
activities are strong the problem of discipline 
practically disappears. The pity is that such 
activities are not generally recognized for their 
direct value for training in citizenship, and en- 
couraged as an essential part of the school life. If 
the schools exist for the purpose of producing a 
better citizenship, why should they not become 
laboratories of citizenship where the problems of 
the school community are solved? At the basis of 
these problems lie the same principles as are fun- 
damental in the problems of the Town, City, 
State, and Nation. 

At the high school age the pupils are coming 
into full realization of their social instincts. It 
is strange that we have been managing our high 
schools as if our pupils were to be citizens of a 
despotism where the highest virtue is unthinking 
obedience. This habit of rendering unthinking 
obedience to a government, no matter how bene- 
ficent, is exactly the habit most favorable to the 
party boss. The habit of loyalty to a fraternity 
or a society, even if its interests are contrary to 
those of the school, is a good foundation for loy- 
18 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

alty to a political party, even if it becomes the 
tool of special interests working for public de- 
moralization. Is it not clear, then, that one of 
the first duties of the public school is to make its 
charges intelligent concerning these questions 
that most vitally concern our community wel- 
fare? And is it not also clear that they should 
learn to apply the knowledge of cooperative 
social betterment imperatively demanded for 
their daily lives? 

If our high schools are to teach these political, 
social, and economic truths, there must be a 
revolution in the program of studies and in the 
point of view from which every subject is ap- 
proached. The tradition that every pupil enter- 
ing the high school shall study algebra and a for- 
eign language must give way to the larger public 
concern that every pupil must become intelligent 
concerning the facts of present-day life. Instead 
of insisting upon the deepening of our academic 
ruts, the school must stimulate the public intelli- 
gence, inculcate aggressive public righteousness, 
and exalt conscientious public service. Then it 
must offer a sufficient diversity of opportunity to 
permit intelligent choice in the lines of general 
preparation for the numerous vocations toward 
which widely differing individuals are drawn, 
19 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

including, of course, the professions for which 
alone our present course offers adequate prepara- 
tion. 

This diversity of opportunity will serve the 
public welfare because it will lead to the various 
types of trained service the public needs. The 
manager of a department store could not use 
advantageously a force of which seventy-five per 
cent were window-trimmers. In simple fairness 
a truly democratic school must open its doors of 
opportunity as wide to the future artisan, artist, 
merchant, and farmer as it does to the future 
doctor, lawyer, preacher, and teacher. But from 
the point of view of the public the chief reason 
for this extended opportunity is the imperative 
need of the community for trained men in every 
line of activity. At present thousands of men 
whom the Lord intended to follow plows and 
drive nails are gouging each other and mulcting 
the public in the shabby-genteel crush after 
patients, clients, and congregations. Pills and 
red tape are dispensed everywhere, but you must 
"bespeak a fortnight before" the man who can 
plant the garden or repair the storm windows. 
This is because our educational train has been 
through-scheduled for the professions, and the 
thousands who found that they did not care to 
20 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

reach this destination have been bowled of! like 
mail sacks wherever it happened, instead of being 
comfortably landed where they ought to have 
gone. 

It would be easy to suggest lines of school 
activity in the interest of this larger return to 
the community by enumerating a dozen kinds of 
trained service urgently needed. Specifically, 
however, a better answer can be had by a study 
of some phases of our decennial stock-taking in 
the Thirteenth Census. Such studies will reach 
widely different conclusions for different com- 
munities and will indicate a wholesome local 
variation in the educational program. The fol- 
lowing facts furnish conclusive proof, for example, 
that one line of educated service is greatly needed, 
and point the way to a revision of the high- 
school curriculum in many localities that could 
not fail to be salutary. 

The report of the Census of 1910 says: "It is 
a significant fact that between 1900 and 1910 the 
urban population increased 34.8 per cent and the 
rural population only 11.2 per cent." The total 
farm acreage, on the other hand, increased only 
4.8 per cent. The report for all of the cereal 
products of the farm shows an increase in acreage 
of 3.5 per cent, in quantity produced 1.7 per 
21 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

cent, and in value 79.8 per cent. Less than 
2 per cent increase in quantity brought nearly 
80 per cent increase in cost. 

Who paid this 80 per cent? 

We all did. Why did not some part of this 
80 per cent find its way into our individual 
pockets — yours and mine? Possibly because we 
were a part of the 34.8 per cent that had moved 
into the city. There are many causes for the 
increased cost of living. This is one of them. 

How could the high schools improve this con- 
dition? They could teach the knowledge gained 
by the Department of Agriculture, which has 
shown in hundreds of cases all over the country 
an increase of from 25 to 100 per cent in crops 
raised under the scientific direction of its experts. 
There is ample room for this improvement, as 
witness the comparison of average crops to an 
acre in three staples raised by the United States 
and Germany: — 





Wheat 
Bushels 


Oats 
Bushels 


Potatoes 
Bushels 


United States 
Germany- 


14 
29.8 


29.4 
5i-5 


92.7 
200.8 



Germany is producing about twice as much to 

the acre as America — not because she has better 

land but because she employs better methods. 

Our scientific agriculturists know these methods 

22 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

and we — the people — own the schools where 
these methods can be taught to our boys, who 
are the pupils. 

Are we teaching the things our boys and girls 
need to know to become intelligent producers 
from the land? Here is an extract from the analy- 
sis of the subjects studied in 8097 high schools, as 
published in the report of the United States 
Commissioner of Education : — 

Percentage 

Latin, French and German 82.64 

Algebra and geometry 87.72 

Agriculture 4-66 

Domestic economy 3.78 

If the Department of Agriculture can secure a 
gain of from 25 to 100 per cent in crops managed 
under its direction; if we have too few people in 
the country and too many in the city; if we are 
all suffering from high prices at least partly 
because of insufficient production from the land; 
and if the instruction in agriculture in our own 
high schools will tend to keep our boys and girls 
on the farms where we know the majority will be 
infinitely better off, and at the same time furnish 
us more food because they have learned improved 
methods of agriculture, — is it not pretty clear 
that we need a revolution in our high school 
curriculum? 

23 



v/ 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The fact that the high schools are so exclu- 
sively bookish and academic, that they are prac- 
tically college preparatory schools, keeps thou- 
sands of pupils every year from crossing their 
thresholds; but let us look at the results to those 
who actually enter. Statistics of the United 
States Bureau of Education show that 40.94 per 
cent of the pupils in 11,277 high schools are in the 
first year; 26.94 per cent in the second; 18.63 P er 
cent in the third; and that 13.49 per cent are in 
the fourth. To be sure, the schools are not alto- 
gether responsible for this loss; but let us see if 
their procedure throws any light on these appal- 
ling vital statistics. The high schools of the State 
of New York are under the most complete super- 
vision and the most thorough organization of any 
in the United States. Some notorious defects 
found elsewhere would be impossible there. The 
course is fairly representative of conditions in 
the States of the North and East. The standard 
of passing is low — only 60 per cent. For the 
most part, however, the purely academic nature 
of the curriculum still persists to such an extent 
that of all pupils taking the regents' examinations 
in January and June, 191 3, only 71.2 per cent 
succeeded in passing. Evidently, a pupil whose 
interest cannot be engaged in the phonographic 
24 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

reproduction of a textbook would be wise to com- 
mit some crime that would take him to an in- 
stitution for delinquents where he could secure 
the education and training he needs. 

Is it not possible that, from the point of view 
of every boy and girl, our present courses have 
assumed purely intellectual interests that often 
do not exist? Can we not, by offering broader 
opportunities, meet the life needs of very many 
of the 87 per cent who now fail of graduation? 
Can we not build a broader foundation for com- 
munity service and for the personal happiness of 
the many pupils who are now lost to us by the 
end of the first year? 

Why does practically every first-year pupil 
take algebra and a foreign language? Why do 
any in the early part of the course take ancient 
history, a subject for which they have absolutely 
no apperceptive basis and which at best can be 
only a parrot recital of unintelligible facts? Why 
does their English course cover literature that is 
mostly away beyond their comprehension, and 
employ methods that produce a positive dislike 
for the great things in literature? Why is their 
science almost entirely dissociated from their 
everyday life? Because the course of study, the 
methods of teaching, and the syllabi are dictated 

25 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

by the colleges. Let me emphasize it again. Prac- 
tically all of the boys and girls in the school are 
forced to take subjects taught on these exclu- 
sively college preparatory lines because every 
subject in the majority of high schools is taught 
that way! Yet over 90 per cent of the pupils 
will never go to college! 

The American people have committed them- 
selves to a scheme of universal democratic edu- 
cation. They have undertaken this task, not as 
a philanthropy, but as a means of preserving and 
perfecting their democratic institutions. They 
have no concern for academic traditions evolved 
from a scheme of education aimed to serve an 
aristocratic or leisure class. They care about the 
social thinking of the rising generation, about 
their standards of civic righteousness, about 
their efficiency in government — in doing to- 
gether the things that all the people must do 
together. As communities they care that the 
schools turn out a product that can render the 
economic service that the community needs; 
and as individuals they care a great deal about 
their boys and girls. All the boys and girls should 
be educated. Those who need the classics and 
the higher mathematics should have these sub- 
jects; but the doors of the schools supported by 
26 



A SOCIAL VIEW 

all the people should not be slammed in the faces 
of those of the people's children who care nothing 
about the classics and the higher mathematics. v 
What is most important of all is that the present 
criticism and unrest in education, as in all other 
lines of social activity, shall not subside until 
reasonable public demands are adequately met. 



II 

THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

The school loafer is a deplorably ubiquitous fact 
in practically every high school of the purely 
academic type. He is proof against all pedagogi- 
cal pleas and threats and cajolings, he is the 
despair of his parents, and the shining example 
of failure featured in every argument against the 
American high school. The only lesson he is 
learning thoroughly is how to evade all useful 
work. He speedily comes to accept himself as a 
failure, and toward him the habitual attitude of 
mind of the traditional schoolmaster is that he 
should be shoved out of the school as quickly as 
possible. 

Undoubtedly this is the wisest course if the 
school cannot fasten his interests and enlist his 
efforts. The trouble is, however, that the school 
is quite as much to blame as the boy, and that it 
is in effect denying all educational opportunity 
to many boys of the best possibilities simply 
because it is exalting certain schoolmasterish 
notions of absolute values above the recognition 
28 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

of its real social problem which would surely be 
revealed by a scientific study of the function and 
duty of the public high school. 

There is no real antagonism between the vari- 
ous forms of education urged by the most pro- 
gressive advocates of a broader course of study 
and the content of our present curriculum except 
the exclusiveness of the latter. Even the most 
radical of the progressives will join in honoring 
the classics and the scheme of education for 
which they stand. He will honor the "dead" 
languages, crystallized into everlasting life by 
the immortal bards and philosophers at whose 
feet all succeeding ages have been enlightened. 
From these languages our seers have learned their 
own; from them they have absorbed the world- 
stories that all modern literatures have repeated 
in endless variation. The race has needed and 
still needs this type of education; but the revolu- 
tionized social and industrial conditions of to- 
day are forcing upon us a new type of education 
equally necessary. Hence the arraignment of our 
high schools by such eminent men as Mr. James 
J. Hill and the constant attacks from the pulpit, 
the platform, and the press. 
I The problems of the two types of education 
might be summarized as follows: — 
29 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The Old School served— The New School serves — 

A few boys destined for the profes- All sorts of boys destined for every 

sions. occupation. 

Boys made resourceful and indus- City boys, who have never been re- 

trious by farm work. sponsible for a single task. 

Socially and mentally homogeneous Sons of every nation under heaven, 

sons of American parents. as heterogeneous as an election- 
day crowd. 

A few thousand boys zealous for A great many thousand boys, mostly 

learning in preparation for a defi- unambitious and purposeless. 

nite life purpose. 

A simple social order, with few occu- A highly complex social order, with 

pations and few problems. innumerable activities and inter- 
dependent problems. 

In spite of this contrast the academic high 
school of to-day is largely the old school. It is 
time for it to wake up to its new problem. The 
boy whose ambition brought him to the old 
school needed its vigorous book training. The 
difficulties of Latin and Greek set him a mental 
task commensurate with the physical trials he 
had overcome from tender years. If he proved 
able to cope with only physical difficulties he 
went back to the farm; so Latin and Greek per- 
formed excellent service as a fine-meshed sieve. 
If he found joy in mental achievement, as he had 
in the rough bodily struggle of the countryside, 
he went on to intellectual mastery, growing 
stronger with every victory. It was the problem 
of the old-time learning to make him a leader! 

The immature boy, emerging from the eighth 

30 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

grade in the grammar school to-day, goes to the 
high school generally because his friends go there 
and because he has nothing better to do. He has 
no definite purpose, little ambition, no sense of v 
personal responsibility, no resourcefulness. His 
life has been one long response to a thousand 
appeals to his desire for novelty and amusement. 
It is the problem of the new school still to train 
leaders, but its first problem is to make the best v 
possible citizens of all. 

Our first question in making useful citizens out 
of these youngsters is not how to teach them 
certain traditional studies. In no school subject 
is there a sacramental virtue that makes it 
an indispensable means of intellectual salvation. 
Let us remember, too, that we have boys of every 
kind of temperament, from every kind of home, 
with every kind of ability — and no two alike. 
The high school has a chance to help them for a 
period extending from a few months to four years. 
Their value to the community which is paying 
for the high school depends on their integrity, ' 
their economic efficiency, and their militant civic 
righteousness. Is it not a fair proposition that 
the school should study its raw material and the 
kind of product the market needs, and that it 
should turn out as nearly one hundred per cent of 

3i 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

marketable goods as the conditions will permit? 

The feelings of a typical youngster about to 
enter the high school and the motives that de- 
termine his choice of a course may be represented 
by some such diary as the following: — 

"January 31. I am to enter high school to- 
morrow — one day more. They have an elevator 
down there, and an orchestra, and a school paper; 
and you have six teachers instead of one; and 
there are societies and fraternities — I wonder if 
they will rush me! And you have to take a for- 
eign language and algebra; and they sometimes 
stand ' f reshies ' on their heads and put snow down 
their backs. And the goblin — I mean the prin- 
cipal — will get you if you don't watch out. 

"February 1. I got up at five o'clock and went 
over to 'Red' Smith's. I kept thinking what the 
boys would do when they saw me in long pants; 
and every little while I had a queer feeling just 
at the top of my belt when I thought of going to 
high school. Well, the boss guy — they call him 
'Blinker' — gave us a game of talk and told us 
where to go — and we went, or tried to; but I 
did n't always get there. I wonder what he'll say 
when he finds I did n't show up in two of my 
classes. There were five hundred of us freshies. 
I took Latin instead of German or French 
32 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

because 'Red ' did — and his uncle is a preacher." 
These immature boys have reached a convul- 
sive change in their school lives, and now as never** 
before need wise and alert individual guidance. 
If the high school is to give this it must first 
bridge the gulf between the grammar school and 
itself, and profit by all that the lower school has 
learned about every boy. The grammar school 
and the high school are coordinate parts of a big 
public agency working for the improvement of 
society. It would be about as reasonable for the 
buyers of a mercantile house to ignore the sales- 
men as it is for the high school to assume an 
air of independence — not to say of collegiate 
arrogance — toward the grammar school. As a 
rule, however, each of the schools goes its own 
way, with little notice of the other beyond an oc- 
casional complaint. About all that ever happens by 
way of real cooperation is a report from the gram- 
mar school as to how many pupils are going to the 
high school and sometimes how many have elected 
each language or course. If there were cooordi- 
nation, the comments carried back to the gram- 
mar school by the boys about conditions, meth- 
ods, and teachers in the high school would be a 
most illuminating and valuable opportunity for 
the latter institution to see itself as others see it. 

33 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

Suppose we follow the fortunes of a typical 
group of a hundred high school freshmen. The 
grammar school principal was not infrequently 
a sort of combined father — or mother — con- 
fessor, social worker, and home missionary to the 
community. He has dealt with the children as 
individuals for eight or nine years, and knows the 
personal peculiarities of John and Frank. He has 
strengthened the feeble wills and confirmed the 
growing virtues by requiring a pretty faithful 
accounting every day for the daily task. 

When they reach the high school these pupils 
are thrown at once on their own resources. They 
have been accustomed to prepare their lessons 
mostly in school under the teacher's eye, and 
they have had to "stay and make up" if the 
day's work was neglected. Each pupil was 
accountable to only one teacher, who saw that a 
proper balance was preserved between the vari- 
ous subjects and that the weak places were 
strengthened. Now they have four or five abso- 
lutely new subjects. They take their books 
home, sit down with them in the family circle, 
and, while trying to study, listen with one ear to 
the evening's gossip. Next day, if they fail to 
recite, they "get a zero" — an excellent prepara- 
tion for another zero to-morrow, particularly 
34 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

when their zeros have plenty of good company. 
These zeros do their deadly work at report time 
and spell failure at the end of the term; but, like 
other kinds of future punishment, are more 
efficacious for vengeance than for reform. Each 
boy recites or fails to recite to five or six teachers, 
no one of whom knows how much study other 
teachers are requiring nor what kind of work the 
pupil is doing in other subjects. Every one of 
these teachers is a specialist in her branch of 
learning. She casts an eye of pity on the masses 
who are rotting in ignorance of her particular 
mystery; so her duty is "as plain as way to 
parish church. " These teachers, moreover, are 
generally the raw recruits to the profession. 
Those whose experience has proved their success 
are given charge of the smaller classes of advanced 
pupils who are preparing for college. By these 
graduates the school is to be judged; therefore, 
if the teacher's ability is doubtful she is given 
freshmen, where her lack of skill will not show. 

Another important fact about the freshman's 
teachers is that probably four fifths of them are 
women. Far be it from the writer to disparage 
the quality of instruction given by women teach- 
ers; it is probably fully up to the average of that 
imparted by men. We need women in boys' high 
35 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

schools to give the young barbarians some con- 
tact with the refining influences of femininity; 
but, as Rosalind ironically implied, you can have 
too much of a good thing. The male teacher, 
moreover, as a rule, has been a boy himself, and 
the boy needs his influence. Hence it seems most 
unfortunate that high schools should be so largely 
"manned by women." If the faculties could be 
composed of about equal numbers of men and 
women, of equally good personality, the service 
of the schools in really shaping future society 
would be infinitely enlarged. 

Our boys are entering a new stage of life. They 
leave the home community and go downtown to 
school. Thus are opened up to them the thousand 
distractions of the center of the city — the street- 
car ride, department stores, fakirs, moving- 
picture shows, vaudeville, poolrooms — and 
worse. In the school there are athletics, societies, 
the big study hall, the crowded corridors, the 
lunchroom, the gymnasium, and the school 
organization which often seems necessarily inex- 
orable. To it they are not individuals, but a 
mass, too often subjected to the law of the 
survival of the fittest. This is unfortunate, be- 
cause it often happens that the fittest do not 
survive, and that those capable of the largest 
36 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

growth are stunted because the school has a 
single treatment for all cases. Witness Edison, 
Darwin, Beecher, Emerson, Wagner, Seward, 
and many others whom the schools discarded as 
dunces. 

Of our hundred boys, many are hopelessly lost, 
so far as the first term's work goes, at the end of 
the first six weeks. Then they begin to drop out. 

According to the statistics of the United States / 
Commissioner of Education, 41 boys will not 
return the second year; 62 of the original 100 will 
not return the third, and 76 will not return the 
fourth year. Of the 24 left, somewhere from 5 to 
10 will go to college. Here, then, are the American J 
Beauty roses, for which we have pinched off 90 
to 95 buds. And after all our trouble the college 
tells us that of these only one is really a rose and 
that the rest are sunflowers. 

The disaster to many who stay in the school is *l 
greater than to those who are shoved out. "I 
must keep my eye on that gang!" remarked the 
principal of a high school. The gang comprised 
about a dozen boys; and the sudden hush as the 
principal and his companion passed did not indi- 
cate a lack of interesting material for conversa- 
tion. That afternoon the water was turned on at 
the emergency hose in the hall near the office, 

37 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

and the floor was drenched with six or eight bar- 
rels of water before it could be turned off. That 
gang had four interests in high school in about 
the following order: first, the "frats"; second, 
athletics; third, deviltry; and fourth, girls, — 
all very human; none particularly fraught with 
educational or cultural possibilities. Worse than 
this, that gang, composed of school loafers, is 
typical of nearly every high school in the country. 

The loafer is very frequently a chronic truant. 
Here is a case that you, Mr. Principal, will recog- 
nize. Reginald Buehler sent word that he had 
gone to work and you took his name off the roll. 
Two weeks later — or was it six? — you found 
out, quite by accident, that his parents supposed 
he had been in school every day. He had left 
home at the usual time and in all respects had 
been a model of punctuality. His mother had 
found a queer piece of cubical chalk in his pocket 
and had wondered at the change in school sup- 
plies since she was a girl! Once or twice she mis- 
trusted that she smelled — but her boy certainly 
was above such suspicion! 

Did you find out what was really the trouble 

with that culprit? Did he ever tell you that he 

hated school, that he hated his teachers, that he 

hated his lessons, that he hated you? Did you 

38 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

talk to him about culture and mental discipline 
and about preparing for life? Did you force him 
back into the classes he hated because the first 
article of your pedagogical religion was that 
without the shedding of Latin there is no remis- 
sion of ignorance? 

The loafer is not intellectual. You may sugar- 
coat your mental pill an inch thick — it is still 
as bitter as quinine. He wants to do something! 
Then, why not give him something to do? In 
nine cases out of ten, if you take the loafer out 
of the Latin class and make him roll up his 
sleeves and sweat while he is fitting two boards 
together, he will be captivated. He will even » ■ 
study a book if he can see how it connects up with 
his own life — now. He probably will make a 
bungling job memorizing the provisions of 
Magna Charta; but he can easily be induced to 
study the activities of the ward boss, and he can 
be made to see how this functionary's machina- 
tions blast the efficiency of the fire and police 
departments. He probably will not get frightened 
over the direful prospect of humanity threatened 
in the theory of Mai thus; but he can be made 
to see that he is paying freight when he buys an 
orange. 

Another queer thing about the loafer is that he 

39 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

very often makes good. This he does in spite of 
the school which has done its best to spoil him 
by a most thorough course in not doing the thing 
he is supposed to do. When he strikes his gait, 
however, he often develops an earning capacity 
that gives a sickly grin to his professor's chronic 
state of dignified impecuniosity. 

Is it not a fair proposition that the school 
should provide something for the loafer to do? 
Experiments have been made with various lines 
of manual activity in the school and with a com- 
bination of schoolwork and outside shopwork 
that have proved the possibility of enlisting the 
interest of the loafer. Moreover, when these 
interests are discovered they are always found to 
demand some form of academic work; so that 
the boy as he is, and not the boy as he might be 
if he were cast in the ideal mold used for us school- 
masters, is put to school to learn something of 
value to him. 

What have we done for the boy who, because 
of economic stress, can come only a year or so? 
We have tried to teach him to swim by giving 
him a chemical analysis of H2O. We have offered 
him a curriculum of admittedly little practical 
value, however well it may be devised as a basis 
for something further on, where he can never 
40 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

hope to go. It is as if a salesman out of employ- 
ment should ask for a letter of introduction to the 
owner of a big department store and be given a 
passport to Russia. 

The beginning of every term brings to the 
principal's office several parents, representative 
of many more in like circumstances, with an 
appeal like this: "My boy can stay in school one 
year or possibly two. What can you give him 
that will help him to earn a living at the end 
of that time? " This insistent question is often 
backed by home details that must arouse admi- 
ration for the parents whose self-denial makes 
possible even a meager opportunity for their chil- 
dren's secondary education. Here is another that 
is typical of a familiar tragedy that you, Mr. 
Principal, will recognize: — 

"Please, Professor Virgil, may I drop Latin 
and algebra? When I entered I expected to go 
through school and go on to college; but my 
father died last summer. My mother says that 
if I will sell papers this winter she will try to keep 
me in school until June. Then I must get a job 
and help support my younger brothers and 
sisters. I would like to take something that will 
help me next June." 

Then you gave the boy a nice fatherly talk, 
4i 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

wherein you painted a picture of the beauty of 
culture and the mysteries of mental discipline 
on a canvas already filled with computations of 
rent, potatoes, and coal. You ended your dis- 
sertation with a casual remark that you could not 
think of letting him drop these subjects, anyway, 
because your first official duty is to uphold the 
standard of the school. Maybe, under your breath, 
you were cursing the whole culture, mental-disci- 
pline, and upholding-the-standard fetish, and 
wishing you could give the boy what he needed 
to help him meet his problem; but if you were 
diplomatic you held your peace — and your job 
— and showed to the next newspaper reporter 
that called a complimentary letter you had re- 
ceived from the registrar of Yale on the excellent 
record of Reginald Smythe, 19 — . 

The high school is failing to solve its social 
problem for two reasons: first, because its course 
is too narrow; second, because the method and 
scope of its teaching are cramped into the Chinese 
shoe of tradition. The broader course that will 
meet the needs of all classes of boys — from the 
"footballer" to the bookworm — must place on 
an equality its foreign languages, mathematics, 
history, civics, economics, sociology, agriculture, 
business training, and manual arts. Moreover, 
42 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

the content of the courses in each of these lines, 
and the aims and the methods of instruction, 
must be determined by the capacity of the stu- 
dents as they are and by social and economic 
needs, rather than by the foundations required 
for advanced courses or by professorial theories 
as to the complete and logical organization of 
subjects. 

Perhaps no single fault of our modern pedagogy 
has caused greater waste than the substitution 
of the logical for the pedagogical method. The 
foundation for a forty-story sky-scraper must be 
laid deep in the underlying rock, but if we were 
compelled to build our dwellings on such a basis, 
the most of us would live in tents. Similarly, 
plans for the treatment of various subjects, 
from the point of view of post-graduate research, 
would call for so much time delving for founda- 
tions that the builders would never reach the 
surface where flourish the flora and fauna of 
everyday life. 

The exaltation of certain subjects, such as 
foreign languages and the higher mathematics, {/ 
into an aristocracy so narrows the course that it 
meets the needs only of those who may be classi- ! 
fied as book-minded in contrast with the motor- 
minded type of children. Professor Dewey re- 
43 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

minds us that distinctively intellectual tastes 
are by no means universal either as indigenous 
or cultivated products. Probably this is fortu- 
nate, because in spite of all our labor-saving 
machinery there still remains an overwhelming 
quantity of physical work that must be performed 
in the interest of the progress of the race. 

The absolute prescription of the aristocracy 
of the curriculum rests either upon the theory of 
the old " faculty psychology" — that the mind 
is an aggregation of water-tight compartments 
and each of these subjects a pumping-station for 
one of them — or upon the theory of general 
discipline — that power generated, in the study 
of Latin, for example, can be switched on to the 
problem of making two blades of grass grow 
where one grew before. Both of these theories 
have of late been seriously questioned by many of 
the best psychologists, and in their place the 
formation of correct habits as the fundamental 
basis of education has been emphasized. Even 
granting the formal-discipline theory, there 
would be ample justification for a broader cur- 
riculum. Ex-President Eliot, in his admirable 
little book, Education for Efficiency, says: "We 
have lately become convinced that accurate 
work with carpenters' tools, or lathe, or hammer 
44 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, 
or camel's-hair brush, trains well the same nerves 
and ganglia with which we do what is ordinarily 
called thinking.' ' 

In this process the languages and higher math- 
ematics must stand on their merits alongside the 
hammer, the violin, and the pencil; and many 
educators are becoming convinced that for a 
considerable proportion of our pupils the tradi- 
tional studies are rather a means of forcing them 
to leave the school in disgust than of furnishing 
a discipline that is certain to be valuable. 

The high school must give every boy some 
experience in handling material things. Nowhere 
else in the course is there so great an opportunity 
to fasten the interest of the motor-minded boy 
who refuses to sit down and study a book. An 
actual experiment with fifty boys of the school- 
loafer type recently completely upset one princi- 
pal's classical pedagogy. These boys had proved 
absolute failures in the traditional course. There 
was hardly one who had not repeated Latin, 
algebra, or ancient history — or all of those 
branches — from once to half a dozen times. 
They were selected because of their proficiency 
in failure, and were placed in charge of a good, 
red-blooded man in a thoroughly equipped wood- 
45 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

working shop. They made working drawings of 
pieces of furniture that they wanted to build, 
then went at the job with good quartered oak. 
Every surface and every joint was inspected by 
the teacher; and that meant that it must be good 
enough to pass muster in any first-class shop. 
The course was no "snap," but the shop was 
busy before and after as well as in school — and 
it "delivered the goods." It was a lotion to the 
soul of the principal — who had been a Nemesis 
on the track of these boys and their like for many 
years — just to watch them work. He would 
have classified perspiration from one of those 
foreheads with the proverbial pot of gold at the 
end of the rainbow, but — mirabile dictu! — he 
really saw them sweat. 

Bill Davis had been in school four years with- 
out passing all of the first-term subjects — he 
had cost the district more in the time of principal 
and teachers than he ever seemed likely to earn; 
but Bill put together a table-top so well that it 
was hard to find where the boards were joined. 
He decided to abandon his father's plan to make 
him a Latin professor and become a piano- 
maker. It is a safe prediction that his pianos will 
ring truer than his Latin quantities. 

Of those fifty boys the shop failed to react* 
46 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND, THE BOY 

just one. Their academic work, too, improved — 
particularly in one subject, of which more here- 
after. The old-line course of study had no point 
of contact with these boys. The school was 
teaching them only idleness. Ought they, there- 
fore, to be dumped on the street or ought the 
school to provide for them as well as for the boys 
whose tastes conform more nearly to our school- 
masterish ideal ? 

The school should provide business training 
based on actual commercial processes. It should 
give the boy who must go to work next June — ■ 
because he has lost his father — a preparation 
that will make him worth more money to his 
employer. To do this it will make sure that he 
can write a bill legibly, add it up correctly and 
know that it is right. It will hammer at his 
English until he can give an accurate report and 
read and follow intelligible instructions. It will 
give him some idea of the social, political, and 
economic questions of to-day — in short, it will 
do all that a school can do to fit the boy to "carry 
the message to Garcia"; and then neither school 
nor society will worry if he does not know the 
occasion of the Third Punic War, the use of the 
subjunctive in indirect discourse, or the formula 
for x + y to the nth. 

47 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

There is one more task for the school more 
important than any of those already enumerated 
— that is, training in citizenship. To be sure, we 
now have courses in history and civics; but as yet 
practically nothing has been done in training for 
the everyday duties whose fulfillment makes for 
righteous community life. 

The fifty boys who went to making furniture 
were also taught a new type of civics. They 
attacked the city government first. They in- 
vestigated the city charter, interviewed the heads 
of the city departments, found out a lot about 
policemen, firemen, school-teachers, ward bosses, 
the dominant party organization, and the com- 
mission form of government. One of their first 
discoveries was the power of the boss whose 
scepter must be held out to every successful 
applicant for a position in the police and fire 
departments. They also found that every ordi- 
nance in a city which thought itself to be exer- 
cising the functions of popular government must 
receive the approval of the same uncrowned 
despot before it could become a law. 

So far as the records of the school revealed, 
not a boy of the fifty had ever absorbed a school- 
book unless through the physical integument; 
but for once they began to study. Was it worth 
48 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

while for those boys to work in the shop — to in- 
vestigate the government in which they were to 
have a voice? At that time there was not a college 
east of Chicago that would give them a minute's 
entrance credit on fair terms for any of this work. 

In closing this chapter, let me repeat: All honor 
to the classics and to the type of education for 
which they stand. They have helped to give the 
nation its literature, its institutions, its laws. 
We still need them and there is not the slightest 
danger that they will not persist; but we need 
something more. We need trained men for all 
our varied activities. We need every citizen to 
think in terms of community and social life. The y 
boys in our schools cannot all be doctors, lawyers, 
preachers, and teachers. They are crying out 
for equal opportunities — a thing very different 
from identical opportunities. If it is true, then, 
that the public needs a new kind of service from 
the boys in the high school, and that the boys 
need the training that will enable them to give 
that service, it is the problem of the high school to 
broaden its course and modernize its methods. 

Is it not true that — 

(i) The public is paying for the high schools? 

(2) The public is therefore entitled to the 
largest possible service to all the people? 

49 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

(3) The high school's largest service is the best 
possible training for economic efficiency, 
good citizenship, and full and complete 
living for all its pupils? 



Ill 

THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

It is a notorious fact that the American people 
are shrewd in their business affairs. Individually 
they scrutinize every business proposition with 
cold-blooded suspicion. Strangely enough these 
sharp bargainers are the largest patrons of com- 
munity gold-bricks in the world. 

When the free and independent American 
citizen collectively bought advanced educational 
opportunities for his daughter he was given in 
return for his money an article that had been 
made for his son. Occasionally it was what the»r 
boy needed; once in a while it fitted the girl. If it 
fitted neither of them the youngsters were to 
blame, and were educationally good for nothing 
but to be cast into the outer darkness of igno- 
rance. Yet the citizen aforesaid continued to pay 
his honest dollars in school taxes, and to blame 
his children when they refused to feed on the 
ashes of a burned-out civilization. 

What does the girl need from the high school? 
What does society want the public high school 
to do for its half-million girls? ; 

5i 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

When the girl comes to the high school, she 
is a tall, lank, awkward, rompish, bashful, self- 
conscious, freakish, lovable youngster, the idol of 
her father's heart. When she leaves the high school 
after four years, she is a neat, trim, graceful, self- 
possessed, responsive, sweet girl-graduate, soon 
to be the idol of somebody else's heart. This 
transfiguration, however, was not the work of 
the high school; it must be credited to Nature. • 

While Nature is working this transformation, 
the school can do much for both the parties to 
the contract — the girl and society. The first 
ithing that society wants of our girl is good health. 
This is the first essential for her efficient service 
and personal happiness in shop, office, store, 
school, or home. The future of the race, so far as 
she represents it, depends upon her health. What 
is the high school doing to improve the girl's 
health? In the overwhelming majority of cases 
absolutely nothing. On the other hand, it is 
subjecting her to a regimen planned for boys, 
without the slightest consideration of the physi- 
cal and functional differences between the sexes. 

It pays no attention to the curvature of the 

spine developed by the exclusively sit-at-a-desk- 

and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed 

to the girlhood of the nation by the mediaeval 

52 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

monastery; it ignores the chorea developed by 
over-study and under-exercise; it disregards the 
malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and lunches of 
pickles, fudge, cream-puffs, and other kickshaws, 
not to mention the catch-penny trash too often 
provided by the janitor or concessionnaire of the 
school luncheon, who is not doing business for his 
health or for anybody else's; it neglects eye- 
strain, unhygienic dress, uncleanly habits, anae- 
mia, periodic headaches, nervousness, adenoids, 
and wrong habits of posture and movement. 

"That is the duty of the home." Unquestion- 
ably it is, and unquestionably the home is com- 
pletely failing to perform this duty. The omis- 
sion of all such considerations from the school 
program will not make the home any more effi- 
cient in tasks for which the overwhelming major- 
ity of homes have not the necessary intelligence. 
It is easy to forget that the number of students 
in the American high school has quadrupled in 
twenty years, and that in the same period the 
preponderance of our population has shifted from 
country to city. Our institutions are being 
strained to meet the changing conditions of this 
period in which our whole social, industrial, 
economic, and political life is in a state of almost 
revolutionary transition; but meet it they must 

53 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

if our civilization is to fulfill the promise of its 
possibilities. The schools are organized to serve 
the progress of civilization by fitting our youth 
for their part in the new order. If a duty that 
under an ideal condition should belong to the 
home can at present be performed only by this 
socialized agency for human betterment; and 
particularly if its performance for the future 
home-makers by this agency promises to fit them 
to take this duty into the home where it be- 
longs, it seems clear that the argument that this 
is the duty of the home is of doubtful application. 
The use of this argument against educational 
progress is an excellent shibboleth to separate 
the two educational camps. If you believe that 
the school exists only to increase the total knowl- 
edge of Latin and algebra in the world, the cry 
"Leave something to the home" is perfectly 
logical, and the assumption by the school of such 
responsibilities as those enumerated above is an 
impertinence. If, on the other hand, you believe 
that the school is a social institution with a mis- 
sion of public service, regardless of the relation 
of that service to Latin or algebra, then you must 
agree that it should look after what every one 
recognizes as the foremost need of the adolescent 
girl. 

54 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

In many schools a reception is given every term 
to the parents of the entering pupils. Suppose 
we stand with the reception committee and see 
what sorts of homes are represented. There is no 
gathering like it. Here comes a man of wealth 
and social position, who believes in true democ- 
racy and realizes the social service of the school; 
behind him is a teamster, whose son or daughter 
may be to-morrow's leader; next, a shabbily 
dressed widow, made timid or defiant by the hard 
knocks of the workaday world; then a clergyman; 
then a carpenter, justly proud of the daughter 
who stands at the head of her class; then a newly- 
rich in ostentatious finery. Each is led up and 
introduced by the son or daughter, and when you 
have met them all, you will say that you have 
seen a microcosm of American democracy. If you 
are patriotic, you will give thanks and send your 
own child right along to the public school to meet 
real life conditions and, perchance, to eradicate 
any traces of snobbery and pharisaism that she 
may have. 

If that evening's experience does not convince 
you that it is the business of the school to do for 
its girls what literally tens of thousands of the 
homes cannot do for them, go with the kind- 
hearted teacher to visit a sick girl. Meet the 
55 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

parent who cannot speak a word of English, note 
the meager house, measure the influence of the 
locality, count the saloons and "movies," hear 
the ragtime hurdy-gurdy, be thankful that 
society has provided a hope for better things for 
children from such surroundings, but do not 
come back and descant about the school sup- 
planting the sacred office of the home. 

One fact that every educator in both camps 
knows is that the home is not attending to the 
health of the adolescent girl. This problem is 
pressing upon us now largely because of the revo- 
lution in living conditions that has come within 
the last quarter of a century. The immense 
growth of our cities, the fierce struggle for exist- 
ence, the increased cost of living, and, most im- 
portant of all, the tremendous number of children 
of foreign parentage, make it imperative that 
the public high school shall conserve the health as 
well as all the other social possibilities of its girls. 
Organized society is paying for the school and is 
ready to sanction a work for God and for human- 
ity that the church has long and vainly sought 
to do, and that settlements and private institu- 
tions have attempted in a few isolated localities. 
The school can do this work better than any of 
these because it can reach everybody, it is not 
56 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

charity, it can be thoroughly democratic, it has 
the confidence of all races and sects, and it is the 
natural agency for fitting the children of all the 
people for the larger living, for opening to them 
the riches of literature, for training their taste 
and appreciation, and for fitting every girl for 
the highest efficiency of which she is capable. 

Loyalty to the old-time learning, enthusiasm 
for scholarship and for exalted academic stand- 
ards, have kept many of our best educators from 
giving their support to the broader activities of 
the school. But the school of the future will relin- 
quish none of these ideals of scholarly achieve- 
ment. It will, however, add to these ideals the 
ideal of social service; it will recognize the recent 
economic and industrial revolution, and will ex- 
tend its mission to the sheep that are not of the 
strictly academic fold. 

It is important to the interests of health that 
the school individualize its course of study. An 
amount of work easily performed by one girl will 
make another girl a nervous wreck. It is nec- 
essary, therefore, that the course of study and 
the machinery of administration facilitate the 
adaptation of the burden to the strength and 
endurance of the bearer. 

"My daughter is missing her girlhood," writes 

57 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

a distressed mother. "She goes straight to her 
studies on her return from school and keeps at 
them until eleven or twelve o'clock at night. 
Saturday she must catch up odds and ends and 
do a couple of hours of drawing. Even Sunday is 
encroached upon for prescribed supplementary 
reading. She is nervous and irritable, the bloom 
of her beauty is fading, and I feel that something 
must be done." 

It is possible for the school to figure out by the 
book of arithmetic the absurdity of this claim, 
and for a considerable percentage of the girls 
the computation will be right. Yet any one whose 
eyes are open to real conditions will have to 
admit that the complaint in this mother's letter 
applies more or less directly to many high-school 
girls. It is, therefore, perfectly obvious that it 
should be made easy for a girl to take a heavier 
or a lighter course according to her physical and 
mental strength; and more than that, that the 
school should very often insist upon curbing a 
girl's ambition to take the maximum amount of 
work. 

Would it not be a sensible program for the 
high school to announce as the first article of its 
creed the development of its girls through the 
critical period of adolescence into the best possi- 

58 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

ble physical health and vigor? If it is to do this 
it will begin with a thorough physical examina- 
tion, which will note defects such as those men- 
tioned above for careful individual treatment. 
It will notify the home where medical care is 
needed, and will itself undertake many tasks for 
physical improvement that it can perform much 
better than any other agency. It will give a 
thorough course in personal and community 
hygiene, with physiology enough to make it 
intelligible. It will require every girl in the school 
to take this course the first year so as to reach 
those who drop out early, even if one of the sub- 
jects now required of everybody for the propaga- 
tion of purely academic culture has to be elimi- 
nated or deferred. Closely related to the hygi- 
ene, it will give a scientific interpretation of the 
girl's environment. The biology laboratory will 
afford a fitting introduction to certain vital phy- 
sical facts that the home ought to teach and 
does not, and will also give an understanding of 
the elements of bacteriology as applied to food 
and household hygiene. 

The gymnasium in every school will drill the 

girls in correct sitting, standing, walking, running, 

and in addition will give orthopaedic treatment 

to correct individual ills. Baths will be available 

59 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

for all and will be enforced where necessary, and 
there need be no doubt about finding numer- 
ous cases for this salutary type of pedagogics. 
Demonstrations of correct clothing will be given, 
with particular attention to corsets and shoes. 
In this connection it is interesting to note that 
during three years in a school of two thousand 
girls, in every single one of the twenty-five cases 
where a girl has fallen downstairs she has been 
wearing high-heeled shoes. Indeed, while it may 
sound like paternalism, there is strong ground for 
maintaining that the school should prohibit the 
more flagrant violations of good sense and mod- 
esty in the form of low-necked dresses, trans- 
parencies, high-heeled shoes, tight-lacing, and 
complexions of the white that never was on land 
or sea. 

The school luncheon, run on a cooperative 
plan, will provide good, nutritious food at a 
moderate price, and will refuse to furnish any- 
thing deleterious to the health of the growing 
girl. Thus it will tend to establish correct habits 
of diet and serve as an example of the possibility 
of securing good food at a moderate price. But 
the school will go much further than the lunch- 
eon: it will, as a second essential of its course, give 
to every girl a thorough and systematic training 
60 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

to fit her for efficiency in the home. Did you ever 
know of a case like this? 

John Doe, aged twenty- two, and Mary Roe, 
aged twenty, fell in love. Following the natural 
order of the universe, that was just about what 
John and Mary ought to do. John was a clerk 
earning eighteen dollars a week and spending it 
all. Mary was the daughter of a department- 
store buyer who earned twenty-five hundred 
dollars a year. As the courtship became serious 
John began to save money. After the usual hesi- 
tation and misgivings on the part of Mary's 
parents, the couple were married and lived — 
thereby hangs a tale the novelist did not tell, 
because there was not a ready market for such 
a story. 

Mary had developed no very extravagant 
notions on her father's twenty-five hundred a 
year, and so exhibited the usual incompetent, 
bridish ecstasy in starting life in a twenty-dollar- 
a-month flat, furnished with the three hundred 
dollars John had saved in the year and a half of 
their engagement. The young couple did not 
figure out expenses much in detail, but of course 
they knew that if Mary did the housework they 
could live on what John had been paying for his 
board. What a comforting delusion that is of 
61 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

Cupid's, that two can live as cheaply as one! 
How mightily does it swell ministerial perqui- 
sites and the birth-rate! 

Mary's housekeeping was a good illustration 
of academic helplessness. The gastronomic mon- 
strosities she evolved with the aid of a cookbook 
ruined John's digestion and his temper. In spite 
of her best efforts the bills rose faster than his 
salary. And with all her mathematics she never 
could balance her accounts. When she did not 
have mamma to ask where things were, the poor 
girl was hopelessly bewildered. She did every- 
thing the hardest way, and worked in vain to 
keep the little home from a state of chaos. John 
gradually drifted away to the poolrooms and 
saloons, which were more attractive than the 
home he was paying to support. 

Mary found herself shabbily dressed after her 
trousseau was worn out, and yet she had to 
admit that the now twenty-two dollars a week 
could not stand the neat tailor-made gown at 
twenty-seven dollars and a half, marked down 
from thirty-five, forty, or fifty dollars, according 
to the popular capacity for absorbing show- 
window fiction. 

It makes little difference on just which of the 
matrimonial rocks the happy little bark was 
62 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

wrecked. Possibly they tided over a temporary 
stringency at the loan shark's; possibly John 
missed his favorite brand of bachelor cigars and 
other necessities, and deserted; possibly he found 
other metal more attractive; maybe some of the 
fathers- and mothers-in-law lent friendly advice, 
not concealing a frank recognition of the short- 
comings of the other father- and mother-in-law's 
child. However it happened, that home was not 
a bulwark to the nation, though Mary had spent 
four years in the public high school, and at pub- 
lic expense had passed first-year Latin, Caesar, 
Cicero, and Virgil, three years of German, three 
years of algebra and geometry, two years of 
ancient and English history, and four years of 
English. This had kept her so busy that she had 
been relieved of all home duties. Every one 
knows that it is important for a girl to get "an 
education." 

Just here it should be emphasized that every- 
thing in Mary's high school course was good. 
There was not a subject that did not belong in the 
school as a possibility for the girl who surely 
needed it. But it seems equally evident that the 
exclusive combination was not all that Mary 
needed. When she undertook to keep John's 
house her high school course did not function. 

63 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

Yet it had cost the community between three and 
four hundred dollars in taxes. It had cost her 
father at least eight hundred dollars. The com- 
munity had a wrecked home to show for its out- 
lay, and Mary's father and mother had an 
infinite heartache. John himself was undoubt- 
edly to blame, but the potential wreck in his 
life had at least not been averted by his wife's 
resourcefulness. It would be presumptuous to 
cast up accounts for the recording angel, but 
it would be altogether proper in a discussion 
of moral education in the schools j; to suggest 
that the public high school should require every 
girl to have some training for efficiency in the 
home. 

The statement by the United States Commis- 
sioner of Education, partially quoted in a pre- 
vious chapter, again becomes interesting. The 
percentage of pupils studying some of the more 
important subjects in 8097 public high schools 
of the United States in the year 1909-10 was as 
follows: — 

Latin, French and German 82.64 

Algebra and geometry 87.72 

English literature 57-°9 

Rhetoric 57-io 

History 55-03 

Domestic economy 3.78 

64 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

The latest census reports show that of Ameri- 
can women twenty-five years old and over, 86.7 
per cent are married. If, in the light of this fact, 
we agree that the public is putting its money 
into the high schools that its children may there 
receive the best possible training for the lives 
they are to live, does not our present practice in 
the education of girls look like going from New 
York to Chicago by way of Cape Horn? 

It seems like a platitude to point out how the 
high school can make the girls more efficient in 
the home. Obviously, it can teach them to cook, 
to prepare, not merely a few puddings and 
meringues and other culinary fripperies, but 
good solid fare, based on a study of food values, 
the necessary elements in a meal and in a com- 
plete dietary. Every girl should be taught how 
to distinguish between fresh and storage eggs, 
how to use oleomargarine when butter soars to 
fifty cents a pound, how to cook the cheaper cuts 
of meat, how to utilize the nutritious left-overs 
that the hired girl dumps into the garbage. In 
the chemistry classes the girl should learn to 
detect preservatives, adulterants, and colorings; 
to distinguish between honest preserves and rot- 
ten fruit pulp, flavored and colored with coal 
tar; to discard fruits bleached with sulphurous 

65 



j 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

acid; to determine whether a given fabric is 
cotton, silk, linen, or wool; to remove spots and 
stains from various fabrics, and a thousand other 
useful scientific applications. 

It does seem strange that physics and chem- 
istry have so long been taught on a purely aca- 
demic basis generally remote from all possible 
use. The laws of heat and light are not the 
less science because they are illustrated by the 
methods of heating and lighting a house, their 
most universal application; the chemical experi- 
ment by which gelatine is detected in milk as a 
substitute for the cream that has been removed 
is quite as educational as the reaction of HC1 
and Mn 2 3 . And the beauty of this approach 
to science is that it works a marvelous transfor- 
mation in the pupil's interest in the study and 
in the interest of the community in the school. 

The girl should learn in the school enough about 
dressmaking and general sewing so that later she 
will be resourceful in making and remodeling her 
own and her children's clothes, hats, and so forth. 
In the sewing and drawing classes taste should 
be trained in matters of both color and form. 
The work in these two departments should be 
very closely correlated, the dressmaking and 
millinery classes furnishing a motive and a 
66 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

practical application of the instruction in draw- 
ing. Kinds of textiles, durability, washableness, 
adaptation to various uses should all be taught, 
not only in theory, but by practical application. 
Skill in household decoration, good taste in the 
selection and arrangement of furniture, discrim- 
ination between clamorous roses and pianissimo 
geometries in rugs and wall-paper, and between 
inexpensive reproductions of the world's greatest 
pictures and the polychromatic, gilt-framed 
atrocities of the department stores, all these are 
as valuable to the girl and the community as the 
"discipline and culture" of paradigms, prosody, 
and parallelopipeds. 

It is highly desirable that household problems 
should be studied completely in a simply fur- 
nished model house, which can be cared for by 
the girls as part of their regular school work. The 
household budget for families of various sizes 
and incomes should be carefully analyzed, and 
problems of buying should be studied at first 
hand in the stores and markets. If it is true, as 
has been estimated, that the woman in charge of 
the house spends eighty per cent of the family 
income, it seems as if such training as is here 
outlined would have a direct value in raising the 
economic and moral status of the home. 1 

6 7 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

Nor are these the only domestic problems that 
the community has a right to demand shall be 
studied by the future home-makers it is educat- 
ing. The most fundamental of all functions of 
woman is that of motherhood. But the instincts 
that make her play house, tend dolls, and sacri- 
fice for her children need to be educated and 
trained before she can do her best in the bearing 
and rearing of the race. Excellent examples of 
the salutary results of even a little instruction 
by visiting nurses and public demonstrations of 
baby-saving have occurred in cities recently. 
For example, in Philadelphia the decrease in 
mortality of children under one year, after a 
general campaign for baby-saving was inaugu- 
rated, was 1 1. 8 per cent. In four of the most 
congested wards where there was a more inten- 
sive campaign, the decrease was 27.6 per cent. 
The total decrease in the number of deaths dur- 
ing the year under an efficient and honest admin- 
istration was 1887, of which n 14, or 59 per cent, 
were children under five years of age. 

Trained intelligence on the part of the mother 
would do infinitely more than this, and the only 
means society has of insuring this intelligence is 
through its organized agency for the spread of 
intelligence — the public school. In the public 
68 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

school, therefore, the future mothers should 
learn, for example, the rudiments of infant feed- 
ing — that the majority of " patent" foods are 
inferior, and that " modified milk" prepared 
under the physician's direction is the best sub- 
stitute for natural feeding; that the various 
digestive functions develop at different ages, and 
that, therefore, the substitution of lentils for 
lacteals should be postponed. They should 
learn how to dress the baby, — that the dress 
should be simple, and that most babies are over- 
dressed in summer-time. They should be taught 
to recognize the early symptoms of ailments 
common to babies and young children, and to 
detect the early signs of the infectious diseases 
of childhood. Thousands of infant lives could be 
saved if people understood the value of quaran- 
tine and worked with the public health officials 
rather than against them. 

Moreover, the school should give some instruc- 
tion in child psychology that will check the grow- 
ing anarchy in the home, or perhaps better the 
despotism too often exercised over the home by 
its youngest member. This training will leave 
no excuse for any of its pupils who in later years 
set before their children the pernicious example 
of lying, in frightening them into momentary 
69 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

submission by fictional " bogey men" or imagin- 
ary punishments. It will teach something of the 
characteristics of the various stages of physical, 
mental, and spiritual development. For example, 
the school will teach the true nature of those 
imaginative ebullitions known to the psycholo- 
gists as "child lies" which our Puritan fathers 
excoriated as evidence of original sin. It will 
teach the danger of "showing off" the child 
until his vanity demands that he always be the 
center of observation. It will make clear the 
scientific cause for the incessant movements by 
which the child gives vent to his superfluous 
nervous force, and thus will warn against the 
constant repression that results in squirming, 
giggling, ill-temper, and St. Vitus's dance. Better 
still, it will give instruction how to direct this 
nervous energy into joyous play or happy, con- 
structive, self-educative activity. In a word, the 
school will concern itself with those discoveries 
of modern pedagogical science that are of vital 
importance to the welfare of the race in adapting 
itself to its present artificial environment. 

It must be remembered, however, that few 

girls go directly from the high school into their 

own homes. Even a superficial acquaintance 

with conditions will show a third duty of the 

70 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

school. An overwhelming number of our girls 
must have a training that will enable them to 
earn a living wage. They must get this training 
during the years usually devoted to the high 
school, because financial stress in their parents' 
homes makes it imperative that they speedily 
become producers. Some can stay only a year, 
some two, some three, some four. Many who at 
their entrance might expect to stay only a short 
time would find ways to remain longer if they 
felt the school's vital connection with life. Obvi- 
ously every girl should receive as much of the 
larger enlightenment that comes from academic 
work as she can. It is equally clear that she 
should receive some directly marketable training, 
for we must remember that her moral and spirit- 
ual life often depends upon her economic inde- 
pendence. 

With the exception of the commercial course 
offered in a few cities, this intensely human 
problem has hardly been touched by the high 
school. A few trade schools for girls in various 
parts of the country are doing excellent work, 
but the problem of economic preparation is so 
universal that it should be boldly attacked wher- 
ever the people are supporting a secondary school. 
It is time for the high school to begin to study 
7i 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

the economic opportunities in its community, to 
find out the individual possibilities of its girls, 
to plan courses for them, to investigate methods 
such as that of alternating a week in the store or 
factory with a week in the school, as is now being 
successfully done with boys; in a word, to come 
down from its academic Olympus and listen to 
the cry of the children. 

Here is something that happens every day. 
A teacher — one of those who are real shepherds 
of mankind — comes to the principal with a 
story like this: "Mary Smith, one of my best 
pupils, must leave school. Her father is a tailor, 
and business has been poor for the last year. He 
has to support four children younger than Mary, 
so that he cannot afford to clothe her and give 
her money for car-fare and lunches.' ' Mary 
leaves school and goes to work for two dollars 
and a half a week, at a blind-alley job that leads 
to a maximum of five or six dollars a week and 
puts a premium on her downfall. The numerous 
experiments with continuation schools alternat- 
ing school and shop, and the various forms of 
part-time work promise better opportunities 
for such cases as this. It is extremely important, 
however, that all school authorities see their 
own part in the solution of this problem. Is 
72 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

it not possible that some manufacturer or de- 
partment store manager could be induced to give 
Mary and another girl a chance to work on the 
alternating plan? On a given week Mary would 
go to the shop and her companion to the school. 
The next week they would change places. Are 
there not also thousands of good women in our 
cities who would take such girls into their homes 
to work on the same plan? From what we hear 
we judge that the servant problem could not 
thereby be made any worse than it is. The school 
could then give these girls in the alternate weeks 
a direct training to make them more efficient in 
their various occupations, conserve their health, 
train them for the homes just ahead, and at the 
same time open to them the inspiration of liter- 
ature, art, history, science, language, or mathe- 
matics, according to their individual tastes and 
abilities. More valuable, perhaps, than any of 
these would be the social democracy and the 
moral and intellectual stimulus that would per- 
meate the spirit of the school as a result of such 
a practice. Honest labor would be ennobled in 
the eyes of pupils more fortunately circum- 
stanced, social distinctions would be diminished, 
and the interests and sympathies of all would be 
broadened. 

73 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

It should be understood that the above sug- 
gestion is not offered as a patent-medicine mil- 
lennium for our educational and social ills. It is 
a suggestion. The school should study the prob- 
lem and find what plan of procedure will in its 
particular community best meet the needs of 
this very considerable proportion of girls. 

Can any one find a better definition of educa- 
tion than this one by William James: "Educa- 
tion is the organization of acquired habits of 
action such as will fit the individual to his physi- 
cal and social environment"? Is not the public 
paying its good money to bring to every boy and 
girl the best possible preparation for the largest 
life he or she can live? Is there any class of 
society in greater need of opportunities for the 
improvement of its condition than the daughters 
of the poorer families? Is it rank socialism to 
believe that every girl should be kept in school 
until she is at least sixteen years old, and if she 
must earn her own living should receive technical 
training that will enable her to earn a living wage? 

The introduction of this type of instruction 
into the high schools would necessitate great care 
that the brief course aimed directly at wage- 
earning does not short-circuit the courses giving 
more complete and more broadly educational 
74 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

advantages. The present four years' course is 
within the means of many thousands of people, 
particularly in the large cities, who might not 
understand its immensely greater relative value. 
The high school can in four years give a pretty 
thorough training in vocational lines along with 
the English, history, science, and mathematics 
necessary for a higher type of business service 
and an intelligent understanding of the world. 

The complete course, a unit in itself, planned 
for those who expect to finish their formal edu- 
cation and their technical training in the high 
school, is the normal center round which the high 
school should revolve. It is entirely possible that 
important modifications of the four-year plan 
may be made within the next few years. How- 
ever this may be, it is generally agreed that the 
girl's high school days should bring her pretty 
well through the age of adolescence and should 
discover to herself her particular aptitudes and 
possibilities. The course should be broad enough 
to meet a wide variety of individual needs. It 
should be adapted to its particular community, 
which it should furnish with workers trained to 
habits of promptness, accuracy, and persever- 
ance, as applied not only to learning lessons from 
books, but also to doing tasks with the hand. 
75 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

If the high school is to do its full duty it must 
not be satisfied only to conserve health, train for 
efficiency in the home, and furnish a means of 
attaining economic independence. It must serve 
those larger interests of full and complete living 
which broaden the intellectual horizon, enlarge 
human sympathies, and bring to its fruition 
the spiritual awakening that comes in the high- 
school age. The social and intellectual environ- 
ment at this critical age should be favorable to a 
sloughing off of the old selfish and unsympathetic 
motivation and the assumption of the racial and 
altruistic interests so characteristic of the best 
type of womanhood. To this end the suggestions 
offered in a previous chapter for making the 
school a working laboratory of social thought 
would contribute directly. 

In this connection also it would be interesting 
to ask a few pertinent questions. What is the 
spirit of your girls' high school ? First, is it peda- 
gogically honest and sane? Do pupils study from 
interest or compulsion ? Are hard tasks conquered 
or played with and evaded ? Do teachers teach 
or just hear recitations — or do they lecture ? Fine 
word, that, — gives one a sense of affinity with 
Emerson and the other transcendentalists. Is 
the education by platoon or by person ? Is the 

76 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

course of study or the pupil the first considera- 
tion? Second, is the school socially democratic? 
What determines popularity, worth or wealth? 
Would the fine student in gingham be patronized 
as a Latin "pony" or entertained as a compan- 
ion? Do the girls dress like stage pictures or like 
just girls? Is their hair their own or "the dowry 
of a second head"? Is there a democracy of all 
the girls of the school? 

The course of study, as frequently suggested 
above, must be so administered as to be easily 
adaptable to individual needs. It should provide 
Latin, Greek, German, French, mathematics, 
science, history, literature, and so forth, for the 
girl of scholarly ability and ambition, and plenty 
of handwork and practical training for the large 
majority who have no distinctively intellectual 
interests. It should require both mental and 
manual work of every girl throughout her course, 
even if this innovation makes it necessary to add 
an hour or two to the school day. It should give 
every girl the fullest instruction she can assim- 
ilate in oral and written English and in the mas- 
terpieces of our literature. It should require of 
all some acquaintance with scientific principles as 
applied to daily life, some familiarity with busi- 
ness practice and elementary accounting, and an 
77 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

introduction to the economic and governmental 
activities of organized society. Whether or not 
we favor woman suffrage, we must recognize the 
probability of its rapid extension. Woman's be- 
wilderment in political matters is due to inex- 
perience, and it is a problem for the public high 
school to give her the intelligent comprehension 
of civic matters that will make her a most salu- 
tary influence in our political life. Woman needs 
intellectual culture, but she also needs abounding 
health; she needs an introduction to the riches of 
science, mathematics, history, language, and lit- 
erature, but she also needs to know the science, 
art, and economics of the home. She often needs 
to go to college, but she more often needs to earn 
a living wage that shall deliver her from the ever- 
present temptation to sell her soul for temporary 
bodily comfort; and pervading all of her school 
training she needs a social democracy and a 
sympathetic intelligence that shall make easier 
her task as the moral and spiritual conservator 
of the progress of the race. 

Is it not true that — 

(i) The public is paying for the high school? 

(2) The public is, therefore, entitled to the 
largest service the school can render to 
all the people? 

78 , 



THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

(3) The high school's largest possible service, 
so far as the girls are concerned, is to con- 
serve their health, train them for house- 
hold efficiency and economic independence, 
and bring them into touch with the larger 
social and intellectual interests of human- 
ity? 



IV 

THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE 

The last few years have witnessed a somewhat 
acrimonious controversy between the high school 
and the college. This discussion arose as the 
high school began to be conscious of itself and to 
recognize its democratic obligations to the com- 
munity that was supporting it as contrasted with 
its obligations to the traditions that had deter- 
mined the content and method of its course. 
There can be only one result in such a dispute 
between a small, essentially aristocratic body 
and a democratic institution, rooted for its very 
sustenance in the great mass of the people. Pro- 
gress toward a mutually satisfactory adjustment 
of the difficulty has naturally been more rapid 
in the democratic West, where its State univer- 
sities, because of their essential democracy, and 
the great Chicago University, with its far- 
visioned sense of realities, have opened the way 
for a solution that will leave the high school free 
to perform its largest service to all the people 
and at the same time to give adequate prepara- 
80 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

tion to the relatively insignificant number of 
pupils headed collegeward. 

In contrast the strife has been most bitter in 
New England and the Middle States of the East. 
Harvard and Columbia Universities have, in- 
deed, done much to prepare the way for a solu- 
tion of the difficulty, and nearly every coeduca- 
tional college and nearly every college for men 
has made important concessions in each succes- 
sive announcement of requirements. The Bastile 
of educational Bourbonism has been the woman's 
college, which, largely because of the fact that 
such facilities throughout the country are so 
inadequate that every year many more pupils 
apply for admission than can possibly be accom- 
modated, has been able to insist upon a program 
extremely narrow in its pedantic adherence to 
tradition, and minute in its picayunish exactions. 
The few high schools which have specialized in 
preparation for these institutions have, therefore, 
been driven far away from the line of their larg- 
est democratic service. 

Generally speaking, however, it is safe to say 
that all over the East the high school, large 
or small, is still failing in its broadest service 
because of the incubus of college domination. 
This is true, first, because its course of study is 
81 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

limited almost exclusively to the narrow range 
of subjects accepted for college entrance; second, 
because the methods and the scope of its instruc- 
tion, even within this cramped curriculum, are 
determined by college entrance examinations 
made by specialists whose point of view is not 
the welfare of the student, but the requirements 
for advanced study of their various subjects. 

The course of study is limited to subjects 
accepted for college entrance because in the vast 
majority of moderate-sized towns only one course 
is possible without too great expense, and the 
college preparatory course is given because it is 
demanded by the most influential portion of the 
community. Public pride in the single boy who 
enters college from the local school is oblivious 
of the twenty who have been driven out in dis- 
appointment by a course that failed to grip them 
with a vital interest. Economical school boards 
veto expensive innovations with the argument 
that the school now prepares for college, and the 
one narrow course for all is continued in the 
belief that Latin and mathematics will develop 
a mental storage battery that will turn the wheels 
of modern industry. 

In communities where several courses of study 
are offered, the results are often much the same. 
82 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

At their entrance to the high school pupils are 
very uncertain of their aims in life. Adolescent 
imitation favors the "college preparatory" 
course, and boyish snobbery is proud to study 
Latin. In half-unconscious acceptance of the 
tradition that the college preparatory course is 
best, teachers turn thereto all who have not 
decided on some definite pursuit. This, at least, 
will guard against unpreparedness if, two or 
three years later, they wish to enter a higher 
institution. Moreover, in turning every one 
collegeward, the high-school principal is safe- 
guarding his own interests, for if one of his grad- 
uates has not had the particular subjects de- 
manded for college entrance the principal must 
face certain criticism and possible loss of position. 
Perhaps most important of all in limiting the 
secondary course to college preparatory subjects 
is the power of tradition. High school teachers 
are, and ought to be, college graduates. The 
richness of their own intellectual lives, however, 
often blinds them to the needs of the masses. 
They make a fetish of the subjects they love, 
and see in foreign languages, algebra, and geom- 
etry the only way of intellectual salvation. They 
fear the ascendancy of practical over cultural 
aims, and feel that in encouraging college ideals 
*3 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

they are uplifting their pupils. The conservative 
public reverences the gospel of the traditional 
subjects and the authority of the college elders. 
Ideals of high scholarship, of unquestioned value 
for the few, are set as the standard for the many, 
and the inexorable law of the survival of the 
fittest denies the opportunities of public educa- 
tion to those who cannot learn the language of 
the monastery. 

How closely the schools are limited to the 
traditional college entrance subjects may be seen 
by a glance at the report of the Regents' exami- 
nations of New York State, which are taken by 
practically all students in all subjects. It would 
seem that if ninety-five per cent of our young 
people are to complete their education in the 
public high school, there should be ample recog- 
nition of the fundamentals of civil government 
and of the principles of economics. These sub- 
jects, however, are practically eliminated from 
a great number of schools because they are 
not generally accepted as units for college en- 
trance. 

The report of the New York State Education 
Department shows that in the history and social- 
science group the number of papers written in 
January and June, 1913, was as follows: — 
84 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

Ancient history 16,958 

All other history, except American . . . 15,639 

American history and civics *3,995 

Civics 555 

Economics 1,275 

While the third group named above is called 
American history and civics, it is to all intents 
merely a history course. The civics is a poor 
relation inheriting only the accidental attention 
that can most easily be spared. 

The mentors of education in college chairs 
possibly can give reasons why such subjects as 
civics, sociology, and economics should not be 
accepted as entrance units. One of them, the 
dean of a great college, recently revealed the 
reason why every college has so many kinks in 
its requirements that only the most careful study 
of extremely complicated English will disclose 
their true inwardness. He said that his college 
demanded many things of which neither he nor 
the faculty as a whole approved. "But," said he, 
"you know every professor has a pet scheme of 

his own. The professor of ology knows that 

if he opposes the crotchet of the professor of 

ism, his own schedule will be reciprocally 

smashed." 

Any attempt to extend the number of subjects 
or to change the scope of existing requirements 
.85 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

for college entrance is met with suspicious scru- 
tiny on the part of many of the colleges. Even 
the authority of the New York State Education 
Department is powerless to add or subtract one 
jot or tittle in the matter of college entrance 
units. By its dispensation of public money this 
department can dictate courses of study, the 
qualifications of teachers, and the methods and 
scope of instruction to the high schools; but the 
necessity of having its credentials accepted for 
entrance has generally forced it meekly to follow 
college suggestion. Hence the Regents' examina- 
tions, by which the high-school pupils of the 
State are measured, are really college entrance 
examinations in another form. 

The single exception to the State department's 
usual subservience to college domination has 
produced a row over the first-year high school 
course in biology. No action of the department 
has met with more general approval on the part 
of public-school men than the introduction of this 
course. The high Olympian arrogance of the 
majority of the colleges is shown by the actual 
experience of a high school principal, who, in his 
ignorance, proposed that some of his pupils offer 
this course as an entrance unit. In substance the 
following conversation ensued between the prin- 
86 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

cipal and the head of the college department of 
biology: — 

College Professor. "We cannot accept that 
course as one of the six additional units required 
for the science course." 

Principal. "Why not, Professor?" 

Professor. "It is little more than an advanced 
nature-study course. It has not the dignity that 
a subject should have for college entrance. 
Besides, the pupils are so young when they take 
it that they cannot possibly get the training re- 
quired as a basis for our courses in biology." 

Principal. "Don't you think, Professor, that 
the first-year pupil in high school ought to be 
given an insight into scientific methods?" 

Professor. "Unquestionably he should." 

Principal. "What would you suggest in place 
of biology? " 

Professor. "Oh, the biology is all right so far 
as that is concerned. Indeed, I think it is the 
best, perhaps the only, thing you can give him." 

Principal. "Yes, it teaches him to do things 
with his own hands, see things with his own eyes, 
and tell the truth in his own language about what 
he has done and seen." 

Professor. "I agree with you that it is a most 
valuable course, but I never will agree to accept 
87 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

it. We can't count on the pupil's knowing any- 
thing as a basis for our college courses." 

Principal. "Which do you want, on the part 
of your freshmen, Professor, a certain knowledge 
content on which you can base advanced courses, 
or the best training that the individual boys and 
girls can have?" 

Professor. "By all means, we want the train- 
ing." 

Principal. "You say, then, you want your 
freshman to have had the best training possible 
at each stage of his development. You admit 
emphatically that nothing is so valuable at his 
entrance to high school as the course in biology, 
yet you refuse to accept that element of his train- 
ing as a unit for college entrance." 

Professor. "Yes, if you choose to put it that 
way." 

Having demolished the professorial argument, 
the principal was obliged to submit to the pro- 
fessorial despotism, make a separate class for 
seven pupils, and give them a course in zoology 
magnanimously outlined by this same professor, 
because those few boys had to have an additional 
subject that the college would accept. Then the 
pupils found after entrance that they were put 
by this same professor into classes in zoology 
88 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

with pupils to whom the subject was absolutely 
new. 

Our present college-dictated high school course, 
then, is ill adapted to the real needs of the 
people, in that it places the emphasis on the 
wrong subjects, and practically eliminates many 
that would be of the greatest practical value in 
the lives of the vast majority of pupils whose 
only opportunity for higher education is in the 
public high school. No less destructive of the 
welfare of the masses is the limitation in method 
of treatment of the subjects taught. 

Lack of space will not permit a detailed analy- 
sis of the evils caused by absolute prescription of 
the quality and quantity of work to be done in 
each subject. Both are measured by examina- 
tions too often set by pedantic specialists, who 
doubtless know enough about the subjects but 
who know boys and girls not at all. It makes 
no difference whether these examinations come 
from a State department, a college entrance 
board, or direct from an individual college. In 
any case the evil is the same. The teacher must 
strain every nerve to cover the ground measured 
by the examination. Excursions into fields not 
traversed by the examination road are absolutely 
prohibited; applications to the real interests of 
89 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

live boys and girls must not interfere with reach- 
ing the goal in the prescribed time; observation 
along the route is valueless if it does not con- 
tribute to the quantity of examinable material 
tied into packages and labeled so as to be easily 
reached when demanded under the stress of a 
three hours' test. Teachers very well know that 
their success is measured, not by their inspira- 
tional power nor by the unconscious tuition 
which their personality may impart, but by the 
percentage of their pupils who make a creditable 
showing. Thus they become skillful in taking 
tithes of mint and anise and cumin, and learn to 
neglect the laws of spiritual growth and broad 
human sympathy. 

In physics and chemistry it is impossible to go 
into the industries of a city and see the practi- 
cal application of the principles studied. Much 
more than the allotted time is needed to make 
accurate quantitative measurements in perform- 
ing the prescribed thirty-five experiments and in 
preparing notebooks that will pass the college 
teacher's inspection. So all the pupils in high 
school science laboriously potter with the laws 
of falling bodies, moments of force, ions, electrol- 
ysis, molecular weights, qualitative analysis, 
conjugation in algae, xylem and phloem, spore 
90 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

formation and fungi, and similar theoretical mat- 
ters, hardly one of which will give any practical 
insight into the scientific meaning of the every- 
day affairs in which their lives will be spent. Of 
the great mass of pupils who are being forced 
through this meaningless grind about &ve per 
cent will go to college, and of those who go per- 
haps one half will take the advanced science 
courses for which college-dictated science in the 
high school is "a foundation/ ' 

Here and there a school, through some peculiar 
good fortune, has been able to experiment with a 
type of science aimed solely to develop scientific 
habits of thought and to furnish a scientific inter- 
pretation of the pupil's environment. Immedi- 
ately such courses have become centers of ab- 
sorbing interest. Instead of dread and aversion 
the pupils have attacked them with enthusiasm 
and delight. Instead of failures that approached 
fifty per cent, success has followed these courses, 
although they have been in no way less exacting 
than the deadly measurements and theories dic- 
tated by professional obtuseness to all considera- 
tions outside of those measurements and theories. 

In this modernized science emphasis is laid, 
not upon man as man, forces as forces, and 
agencies as agencies, but upon the reciprocal 
9i 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

relations of man and his natural and artificial 
environment, upon their actions and reactions, 
upon the adaptations of natural laws to man, 
and his response to these laws. Thus science 
becomes the tool with which the pupil attacks 
the day's work, rather than an abstraction pos- 
sessed of some mysterious value known only to 
the initiated. Thus there is added to the pupils' 
growing interest the ever-widening appeal of 
insight into the mysteries of his environment, 
whether it be the farm with its absolute depend- 
ence upon the laws and forces of nature, or the 
city with its complicated and artificial mastery 
of mechanics and its more or less successful con- 
trol of social and hygienic conditions, all so 
inevitably registered in the sickness and death- 
rate. 

Obviously the new science can be no mauso- 
leum of thirty-five sacred experiments of practi- 
cally unvarying content. If it must interpret 
environment, it must take its problem from 
environment rather than from any theory of a 
complete and logical synthesis of the subject. It 
must discuss with due relation to their local 
applicability such concrete and practical matters 
as the prevention of epidemics, the spread of 
disease by flies and mosquitoes, sewage, the care 
92 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

of trees and plants, fertilizers, the nutritive 
values of foods, the dangers and the detection 
of food adulteration, the analysis of water, the 
removal of stains, labor-saving devices, particu- 
larly those most useful to the community, such 
as the gas engine, the steam engine, electricity in 
its immediate and prospective relation to daily 
life, the chemistry and physics of the local indus- 
tries, and as many other matters of daily obser- 
vations as the time at its disposal will permit. 

High-school mathematics is limited by college 
entrance requirements almost entirely to abstract 
theory and manipulative gymnastics. The time 
of the pupils is wasted in intricate complex frac- 
tions, expert factoring, indeterminate equations, 
complex numbers, quadratic puzzles, and the 
binomial theorem. This is supposed to contribute 
to mental discipline, whereas for the most part 
it contributes to facility in guessing, and to 
technical skill of little worth. The commercial 
teacher is driven to despair because of inaccurate 
addition, subtraction, multiplication, and divi- 
sion; while the mathematics teacher, who is 
tediously belaboring his flock over the pons 
asinorum or the mons professorum, accepts with 
slight discount any result that is correct in 
theory. 

93 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The real mathematics of practical life, on the 
other hand, is a first essential to every boy and 
girl for two reasons; first, because it is the best 
possible medium for teaching habits of accuracy; 
and second, because the subject itself is an inevit- 
able means to the ends of daily life. 

The habit of accuracy, of truthfulness, of 
meeting issues squarely, demands the elimina- 
tion of guesswork in both theory and practice. 
And if the pupil is working at the mathematical 
basis of everyday life he soon comes to under- 
stand the inevitableness of fundamental laws, 
and the necessity of conforming to them. As he 
gains facility in adapting the mathematical laws 
in the same way that he applies scientific princi- 
ples to his daily problems, he comes to delight in 
his mastery of the material world through his 
knowledge of truth. 

If he is to profit thus, he must begin with his 
immediate environment. The shop, the store, 
the farm, household accounts, the family budget, 
— all furnish almost universal applications of 
mathematics. Ratio, direct and inverse, as ap- 
plied in optics, electricity, and gravitation; wa- 
ter and gas pressure, strength 'of materials, and 
dozens of other applications will be found in 
correlating the mathematics with the rejuvenated 
94 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

science of the world in which the common man 
lives. The representation of statistics such as the 
expenses and profits of a business through suc- 
cessive months by means of cross-section paper 
is a real and valuable problem. Similar treatment 
of other subjects of dispute would settle many 
questions that are only obscured by dogmatic 
contradictions. 

The use of a representative letter for an un- 
wieldy decimal and the universal truth expressed 
in a formula are really the short cuts of abridged 
calculations. When they appeal to a pupil as a 
method of solving real problems, instead of as 
abstractions to become valuable in a vague con- 
dition of bliss beyond the registrar, he will be 
glad to employ them. The construction of a right 
angle at a given point will be a problem of interest 
when by it the boy must fit a board, or the girl 
a piece of cloth. The magic of a slide rule, of a 
logarithmic table, of a computing-machine will 
be welcome when it quickly reaches the result 
with machine-like precision. It must be admitted 
that this is all practical, that it does not include 
pure mathematics. At least, however, there is 
reasonable hope that it can be accomplished by 
the rank and file of high school pupils; while the 
overwhelming failures in our present college- 
95 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

dictated course, on a standard so low as to be a 
condemnation of any mathematical work, are am- 
ple evidence that the present course is a failure. 1 
Whatever else the school does, it can make 
sure that its pupils can perform the four funda- 
mental operations in all useful forms of numbers 
with rapidity and accuracy, both by use of the 
pencil and by the old mental arithmetic methods. 
No amount of theory is excuse for failure here. 
The school should feel it a disgrace for its gradu- 
ates to fail on everyday problems, such as the 
amount of radiating surface required to heat a 
room, of paper to cover its walls, the graphic 
representation of statistics, and the computation 
of interest on a fluctuating bank account by 
means of an interest table. Its graduates will not 

1 The report of the New York State Education Department 
shows the following percentage of pupils passing in mathe- 
matical subjects for January and June, 19 13. Sixty per cent 
is the passing mark: — 

Advanced arithmetic 36.2 

Elementary algebra 71.5 

Intermediate algebra 64.5 

Advanced algebra 74-4 

Plane geometry 59-8 

Solid geometry 76.2 

Plane trigonometry 64.9 

Spheric trigonometry . 64 6 

Total 67.1 

96 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

thus fail when it leaves pure mathematics to the 
college, where it belongs, and devotes itself to its 
own task, the development of habitual accuracy 
in the mathematical concerns of daily life. 

In French and German there is little oppor- 
tunity to acquire a workable power over these 
languages that would be of real use in Paris or 
Berlin or in their miniatures in our American 
cities. These living languages of our greatest 
contemporaries must be taught as if they had 
been the speech of peoples buried under the lava 
of twenty centuries. The methods pursued in the 
ancient classics for entirely different purposes 
have limited our study of German and French 
to the translation of a set number of pages of 
literary masterpieces, the acquisition of a literary 
vocabulary, and the accurate mastery for exami- 
nation of all the intricacies of grammar. Yet it is 
possible, without using more time than is at 
present allotted to these languages, to develop a 
facility in their use that will have a direct, prac- 
tical value. 

In Latin and Greek there is little opportunity 
to come into sympathetic touch with the great 
civilizations of antiquity, to appreciate the mar- 
velous beauty of Greek pantheism through my- 
thology, or to comprehend the world-conquering 
97 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

spirit of the Roman language, institutions, and 
laws. The splendid opportunities for training 
the powers of observation and discrimination, 
and for developing originality and accuracy of 
statement in English, are thrown away under the 
goad of an overloaded course and an enormous 
technical requirement. The time must be occu- 
pied almost solely in preparation for a formal 
test on such minutiae as the principal parts of 
'O/jao), the mastery of grammatical exceptions, 
the writing of bad Latin and worse Greek, and 
the crucifixion of the mother tongue in the literal 
translation of foreign idioms. 
! In history mere questions of fact occupy most 
of the time. The pupil is seldom taught the 
relationship between the social conflict in Rome 
and the American trust problem of to-day. He 
is not led to see that the real origin of the 
American revolt against George III is to be found 
in the English revolt against Charles I. The boy 
must enumerate the causes of the Punic Wars 
and of the American Rebellion, but need not see 
the clash of two civilizations nor the inter- 
relation between economic and political forces in 
our great civil strife. 

Nowhere else, however, has the stiff formality 
of an examinable requirement been so fatal as in 

9 8 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

that most important of subjects, the mother 
tongue. College teachers have written the 
courses, trained the teachers, set the examina- 
tions, and execrated the results. Instead of in- 
spiring in the pupils a discriminating apprecia- 
tion of our glorious literature that would be a 
continuous means of education and an unfailing 
resource against ennui, our teaching has pro- 
duced the conviction that Burke is a bore, 
Addison a prude, and Milton a pedant. Instead 
of training pupils to express the experiences and 
emotions of daily life or to write an intelligent 
application for a job, we have killed on 7 any 
interest in Ivanhoe that might have survived the 
minute class memorizing and analysis by com- 
pelling them to write five hundred words about 
the tournament at Ashby. We have given them 
literary texts in which every allusion was ex- 
plained, and have forced them to memorize the 
notes before they were permitted to enjoy the 
story. We have made simple pieces of literature 
that they could have enjoyed alone the subjects 
of such close scrutiny, chasing each fugitive word 
back to the Tower of Babel, that they have wel- 
comed the examination as a release. And when 
their red-inked essays, reproducing the "Ring 
Story," from the Merchant of Venice, and the 

99 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

"Story of Elaine," have been handed back for 
rewriting, our boys and girls have charged the 
abomination to Shakespeare and Tennyson and 
have sworn a solemn, "Never again," against 
every author buried in the graveyard of college 
entrance English. 

For all this the college and the college alone is 
responsible. About 1890 it began to be seriously 
argued that something more was needed in the 
study of English than the canons of rhetoric and 
the lives of authors. The obvious thing to do was 
to study masterpieces. How? Why, just as the 
masterpieces of Latin and Greek were studied, of 
course. At first the colleges prescribed with great 
exactness the texts to be covered and refused 
to accept any substitutes. Gradually the list 
was extended and the privilege of choice within 
definite limits was grudgingly granted. Still the 
college examination has continued to be the 
criterion of success, and methods that achieved 
vicious ends in spite of their good intentions have 
become so ingrained in the pedagogical subcon- 
sciousness that it will take years to arrive at a 
sane procedure. The college examination has 
asked minute questions covering every allusion, 
so that the teachers have been compelled to 
destroy all literary enjoyment in preparation for 
too 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

an examination. It has based its composition on 
the blackened skeleton of the literature it has 
murdered, and then has complained that the 
writing of students lacked style, force, and ac- 
curacy. 

Even if we had the greatest freedom to work 
out our English courses we must admit that the 
problem would be a difficult one. Possibly there 
would be a somewhat general agreement that our 
aim should be, first, to secure power in both oral 
and written expression ; second, to develop a dis- 
criminating taste for literature; third, to secure 
some appreciative acquaintance with the best 
literature. 

Toward the attainment of these ends some 
progress has been made recently in spite of the 
fact that the innovations have been accepted for 
college entrance only as improved results have 
shown the value of methods employed by heretic 
teachers at their peril. Within the last half- 
dozen years it has dawned upon teachers of Eng- 
lish that man is a talking animal. Along with 
other practical considerations we have come to 
realize that the demand for reasonably accurate 
oral speech is much larger than for written 
expression. Available oral language resources 
are heavy assets against the emergency liabilities 

IOI 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

of everyday life. Slowly we have grasped the 
relation between this outstanding truth and the 
duty of the school. At last we are giving pupils 
a chance to talk in^school as they must, by some 
shift, learn to talk after leaving school. With a 
definite problem, namely, to convey to the listen- 
ers something that they must get straight in 
order to make their own next move, the young 
student feels the compelling power of the spoken 
word or gets the reaction from its blundering use. 
Into this oral attainment must enter the elements 
of good articulation, distinct enunciation, correct 
emphasis, inflection, pitch, tone, etc., in giving 
expression to literature and to daily speech. 

This everyday habit must affect written 
expression as well. We have been working at this 
longer, and probably our results are generally 
better — at least, we have discovered a good 
many things not to do. Under college direction 
we have been industriously rehashing the ca- 
davers of the books on the prescribed list and 
as surely establishing in the minds of our pupils 
a list of proscribed books and authors. We have 
inscribed red-ink trespass signs upon square rods 
of wastebasket scenery and indelible crow's-feet 
and acidulous droops upon our own faces. We 
have distended monosyllabic ideas into galleys of 
102 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

osity and ation by our demands for four hundred 
words on "What I See in George Eliot's Face." 
The best teachers have now learned that in both 
oral and written composition the surest sources 
of interest and the greatest possibilities of growth 
lie in the pupil's saying or writing, as he will all 
his life, something that he really wants to say or 
write. Our problem, then, is to discover individual 
interests; to correlate with these interests all 
of the other subjects of the school; through this 
correlation to enlist the assistance of other mem- 
bers of the faculty; and to develop in our pupils 
the best possible habits of oral and written ex- 
pression. 

If we are to meet the test of improving the 
habitual use of English in speech and writing, it 
will be necessary to do more than hand back 
laboriously marked themes. We must work with 
the pupil in conference. He must attack prob- 
lems of expression in the same spirit with which 
he attacks problems in mathematics. We do not 
ask him to find the coefficient of a to the nth. 
without assistance and then red-ink his results. 
We work out the formula with him. In the 
science laboratory, also, we direct his effort, and 
school boards and principals have conceded that 
additional help is necessary for this laboratory 
103 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

work. Is the number of vibrations of the C 
pitch-pipe or the laws of falling bodies more 
important than the habitual use of good English? 
Probably the most important practical consider- 
ation for securing better conditions for teaching 
English is to prove to superintendents, princi- 
pals, and school boards that English composition 
is a laboratory subject, and that it requires addi- 
tional help as much as does science. 

As soon as the problem nature of composition 
is recognized by a pupil his point of view is 
changed. He discovers that composition is not 
guesswork, but telling the truth; he learns the 
use ©f the principles of his textbooks and of the 
suggestions of the teacher. He and his teacher 
gain a personal touch and fellowship that are 
mutually valuable. He begins to realize two 
things: first, that revision of written work is 
possible and interesting; second, that it is im- 
perative. Young people, and sometimes older 
ones, have an impression that writing comes by 
the grace of God — a man writes well by gift, 
just as he has blue eyes or six feet of length. You 
may tell about the laborious studies of Stevenson 
or the endless blotting of Tennyson's lines, and 
the boy pays the tribute of a passing wonder — 
no more. If, on the other hand, he sits with his 
104 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

teacher and together they struggle over a con- 
trary sentence that must be made to say the 
thing he set out to make it say, he gets an illu- 
mination. Under this method the careless pupil 
realizes the keen satisfaction that comes from a 
conquered difficulty. A something that may be 
called the workman's conscience stirs within him 
and stands a fair chance of growth. Such a boy 
or girl will be far more likely to meet the demands 
of the business man's test than the student who 
has passively lamented the inadequacy of his 
returned paper on Milton's minor poems. Inci- 
dentally, a pupil is in the way to develop some 
appreciation of that elusive and indefinable 
essence that we call style, for now he sees the 
value of word and phrase in the simple exercise 
which reflects his own thought. 

A frank recognition of our fundamental aim in 
teaching literature will revolutionize our meth- 
ods. In the first place, our choice of books will be 
determined, not on the basis of a complete survey 
of the field of literature, but by the tastes and 
abilities of the boys and girls at the given stage 
of their progress. With this aim always in view, 
it will be recognized that it is of no particular 
value for pupils to know the stories of Shylock, 
Macbeth, Caesar, King Arthur, and Ivanhoe. 
105 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

Neither have the classifications of lyric and 
ballad, iambus and trochee, romance and realism, 
nor knowledge of Shakespeare's dark lady, nor 
Milton's marital misfortunes, nor Scott's lame 
leg, nor Pope's crooked spine any saving quali- 
ties. Has the literature of the school become a 
savor of life unto life, a nourisher of the spirit, 
an inspirer of nobler ideas and emotions? Unless 
we can reach the essential life at a deeper level 
than a mere show-window display of literary 
tinsel, we had better spend our time with the 
new social science and the new social interpreta- 
tion of history and of physical science that are 
destined to play so large a part in the education 
of the next decade. By recognizing our aim in 
our daily practice, we shall conform to the doc- 
trine that education is the process of developing 
the child from what he is to what he ought to be, 
rather than to our present college-dictated cus- 
tom of leading him from where he is not to where 
he does not want to go. 

On this new principle our choice of literature 
will be much broader than might be supposed, 
because our method will be so changed that 
much that has seemed impossible will be found 
most interesting. For example, the pupils of the 
future will read Scott much as we, who were not 
1 06 



HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 

taught the English classics, read him. The teacher 
will hasten over the first thirty to sixty pages, 
get the class fairly absorbed in the story, and 
then — get out of the way. She will not assign ' ' the 
next chapter"; she certainly will not take the 
time of twenty-five recitations to drag under her 
pedantic arc light every rainbow tint of the story 
by the a what next?" method; she will not exact 
themes on Rebecca's lacerated affections or Friar 
Tuck's bibulous homilies. She will give Scott a 
chance, and incidentally her pupils will read about 
five times as much and like it more than five 
times as well. By thus directing the tastes the 
right way, the reading mania, which seems to be a 
pretty general phenomenon of adolescence, may 
be made to contribute to the literary culture and 
to the intellectual resourcefulness of later years. 
When the attitude of the class toward the 
school literature is thus revolutionized, the 
teacher can approach more difficult books with 
assurance. Literature of varied types can be dis- 
covered to the class. More and more of the 
technical difficulties will be solved because of the 
intelligent curiosity of the pupils. Thus a four 
years' course will eventuate not only in a greater 
knowledge, but also in a discriminating taste that 
will be rich in its promise of literary culture. 
107 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The college, then, is doing the high school 
great injury by insisting upon only certain tradi- 
tional subjects for entrance. The great injustice 
is done to the vast majority who do not go to 
college, but whose opportunities for preparation 
for larger living are limited in a subtle way by 
the dominance of college traditions in the high 
school. The college injures the high school, also, 
by prescribing through its examinations the 
method and scope of treatment of the various 
studies. Almost any subject can contribute to 
real culture if studied in the right way, but the 
prescriptions of college professors, far removed 
in experience and sympathy from the mass of 
Americans, cause a stultification of both teachers 
and pupils. 

When the college grants to the high school the 
right to make its own course of study, when it 
recognizes for entrance any subject well taught, 
when it admits that the welfare of the boys and 
girls is more important than special preparation 
for its advanced courses, when it places the needs 
of the ninety-five whom it never reaches above 
the crotchets of the professor who wants to make 
specialists of the five, then it will enable the high 
school to fulfill its mission of equal opportunity 
to all. 



THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE COURSE OF 
STUDY 

Perhaps the most important element in the real 
service that any educational institution renders 
to its patrons is the spirit of its administration. 
This spirit will be determined by the fundamental 
principles of those in authority, colored, of 
course, by the personal equation that has so 
large an influence upon all human affairs. The 
school administrator will decide the numerous 
questions that arise in the day's work very 
largely according to his idea — perhaps mostly 
subconscious — as to the nature and ends of 
education. If he believes that the aim of the 
schools is to increase the sum total of knowledge 
of certain traditional subjects, he will guide his 
students along lines in harmony with that belief. 
By so doing he will avoid the inconvenience of 
being classed as a disturber of the educational 
peace — or slumber — and will share all the 
emoluments that accrue, in education as in 
politics, to those who are religiously "regular." 
109 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

One of the most important questions in the 
formulation of a program of studies is, What 
studies shall be required of all pupils? The answer 
given in the course of study of the American high 
school up to to-day is based on the aforemen- 
tioned principle that it is the aim of the school 
to increase the sum total of knowledge of certain 
traditional subjects. Therefore, practically every 
pupil, on entering an American high school, is 
compelled to take algebra and a foreign language. 
In a considerable percentage of the schools enter- 
ing pupils are compelled to add to these two 
subjects, ancient history. Every principal knows 
that the high percentage of failures comes in 
these subjects, just as he knows that the over- 
whelming majority of first-year pupils have 
absolutely no appreciative basis for any of them. 
He knows that discouragement with these sub- 
jects is largely responsible for the tremendous 
losses that account for the presence of forty-one 
per cent of the high school pupils of the coun- 
try in the first year, but if he believes that 
these subjects are the essentials of intellectual 
salvation, of course he is justified in requiring 
them. 

Even a superficial consideration of the reason 
why the American people all over the country 
no 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

are erecting high schools that are almost palatial, 
and spending millions of dollars every year for 
their maintenance, will discover as a justification 
for this expense a fundamental aim vastly differ- 
ent from the increase of the net total of algebra, 
Latin, et al. 

Of course it is perfectly trite and obvious that 
the real justification for the public expense upon 
the high schools is the production of an improved 
citizenship. A corollary to this statement is that 
those subjects that will contribute to citizenship 
should be the ones required in the course. If we 
are to serve the cause of citizenship, the first- 
year high school pupil should be required to study 
concrete problems of citizenship. When the gram- 
mar school course shall have been revised to har- 
monize with the same principle, the high school 
freshman will have an adequate basis for more 
advanced work, but, for the present, some such 
book as Beard's American Citizenship, or Guit- 
teau's Training for Citizenship, with ample illus- 
tration and laboratory practice in the immediate 
community, could serve as a basis. 

The study of the social, economic, and politi- 
cal problems of to-day, illustrated and illumined 
by the new type of history study as suggested 
in a previous chapter, should be one of the major 
in 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

requirements for the entire course in every high 
school. To this civic study should be added two 
other inevitable units. Practically everybody 
agrees that the study of the mother tongue should 
be one of the required constants of the course of 
study, and nearly everybody agrees that the aim 
of this course should be practical efficiency in the 
use of English in written and spoken form, 
together with an appreciative acquaintance with 
as much of the best literature as can be covered. 
The increasing understanding of the importance 
of a good physical basis for a life of happiness 
and of efficient service will probably insist upon 
a larger and larger place for the right kind of 
physical instruction for all of the pupils. These 
three constants, civics and the other social sci- 
ences, English, and physical training, would oc- 
cupy from a third to a half of the available time 
throughout the high school course. 

To this should be added as a requirement for 
every girl systematic instruction in those home 
arts, efficiency in which will largely determine her 
happiness and service. Woman's knowledge of 
such matters as these is of vital public concern, 
and the public has the same right to conserve 
its own interests by requiring this instruction in 
the schools it is supporting as the private business 

V 112 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

man has to profit in the advancement of his 
business. With the addition of this unit, some- 
what over half of the time of the girl would be 
taken up with required work, only one element 
of which — English — is at present accepted by 
the majority of the colleges. There can be no 
doubt, however, that the men's colleges and the 
coeducational colleges will coordinate with the 
public schools; and unless there is a readjust- 
ment to modern problems and conditions on the 
part of the majority of the women's colleges, 
inability to send pupils from the high schools to 
some of these institutions will be a real benefit to 
the schools and the communities. 

Some form of manual training should be re- 
quired from every boy for at least one year of the 
course. All civilization rests upon an economic 
basis, and the world's work must continue to 
demand an overwhelming preponderance of 
manual over purely intellectual work. The need 
of our day is intelligent, conscientious artisans, 
men whose coordinated mental and physical 
powers fit them to render services that ingenuity 
has not relegated to the machine. The decadence 
of our agriculture and the inefficiency of our 
artisanship are striking evidences, at once of the 
need of a manual requirement in our high schools 

ii3 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

and of the shortcomings of their present book- 
parroting course of study. 

It is, of course, evident that the smaller school 
cannot offer as wide a range of electives as might 
be desired. Public welfare indicates the neces- 
sity of the fundamentals of civic and social 
science, physical training, the mother tongue, 
home training for the girls, and manual training 
for the boys. Desirable as it is that the widest 
possible opportunity may be offered in the form 
of electives above this required content, it is even 
more important that the subjects offered should 
be well taught, in units sufficiently large to be of 
real value. The temptation to introduce many 
subjects in units of one, two, or three periods a 
week, rather than to give thorough courses of 
four or five periods extending throughout the 
year, has enabled many schools to present a for- 
midable array of subjects in their course of study. 
Pupils from these schools often show a startling 
facility in generalizing on facts and principles 
"that aren't so." The courses of study and the 
recommendations of the best pedagogical author- 
ity, such as the national committees and the 
Carnegie Foundation, show a decided tendency 
to limit the course either to four units of five 
periods per week each, or to five units of four 
114 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

periods each. In addition to this prescription, pu- 
pils frequently take drawing, physical training, 
and music, each for one or two periods per week. 

If the school can offer only one group of studies, 
it should, of course, make such selection as seems 
most likely to meet the needs of the largest pos- 
sible number of pupils. Here will come the pres- 
sure for a college preparatory course for a very 
small number of pupils, with the consequent 
refusal to meet the needs of the much larger 
group whose education must end in the high 
school. Here an awakened public sentiment must 
assert itself, and to this end the present wide- 
spread interest in all sorts of community prob- 
lems and the tendency to question practices sup- 
ported only by tradition are most promising. 
Where the alternative of catering to the larger or 
to the smaller group can be clearly presented, 
the rights of the majority are pretty likely to 
prevail in an American community. Where there 
are insistent demands for two or more types 
of training, the probable result will be the desir- 
able compromise^ increased facilities at public 
expense. 

To these elements of social science, English, 
physical education, and manual arts, there should, 
of course, be added some introduction to the 
ii5 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

various other fields of human knowledge. It 
should always be remembered that it is the aim 
of the high school to open to youth the various 
fields of knowledge, to arouse dormant interests, 
to assist in the trying-out process by which the 
individual finds his way to his particular voca- 
tion and to his avocations. This is an individual 
process. The adolescent years are characterized 
by unusual emphasis upon individual tendencies, 
by shifting from one interest to another, a ten- 
dency evidently calculated to help the individual 
to find his place in the world and his social rela- 
tion to his kind. 

Study of the various subjects along the lines 
of their human interest, rather than along the 
familiar lines of logical acquisition of subject- 
matter, will revolutionize the attitude of tens of 
thousands of pupils toward the studies and the 
school. This revolutionizing process has already 
made much progress in many schools. Whatever 
is done, no pupil should be driven out of school 
because of inability to accomplish any one 
line of work. The ideal of the course should be, 
thorough work along various lines selected with 
a view to the tastes and abilities of individual 
students. 

It is the business of the school to study the 
116 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

pupils, to insist that choice of subjects shall not 
depend upon momentary caprice, to prevent a 
discursiveness that would be fatal to habits of 
concentration, to develop a keen interest in the 
work of the school, and to enforce a fair, honest 
effort. In his book, The American Secondary 
School and Some of its Problems, Professor Julius 
Sachs says: "We are all agreed that the entire 
range of studies embraced in the secondary 
school curriculum cannot be compassed in their 
respective maximum of offerings by one and the 
same pupil; choice must be made, but it must be 
choice under wise and firm direction, dictated 
by professional knowledge and experience, not 
by parental whim or by the dictates of chaotic 
popular sentiment, least of all by the moods of 
the immature pupil.'' 

Just what the program of studies shall be in 
addition to the above-mentioned constants for 
all pupils ought to depend largely upon the local- 
ity, and the types of students and upon the fam- 
ilies they represent. So long as no subjects are 
made fetishes, and no subjects, useful and valu- 
able to a considerable proportion of the pupils, 
are excluded, a wholesome variety in various 
schools will contribute to healthful progress 
through experimentation. 
117 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The method of promotion is another problem 
of the utmost importance in high school admin- 
istration. Fortunately this problem is much 
nearer settlement than that of the curriculum. 
Only a few cities still adhere to the inflexible and 
antiquated method of promotion by grades. Any 
consideration of the rights and needs of varying 
individuals of course indicates promotion by 
subjects as the only sane method. The few 
schools that have not adopted this method of 
promotion have been deterred from doing so 
usually by adherence to the classic tradition that 
what was good enough for our fathers is good 
enough for us, or by needless fear of the compli- 
cations of an untried system of organization. 

There are overwhelming objections to promo- 
tion by grades. Perhaps the most obvious is that 
pupils are compelled to repeat subjects they have 
passed for the sake of other subjects in which 
they have failed. For example, a pupil taking the 
usual first-term course, consisting of English, 
science, history, algebra, and a foreign language, 
fails in the foreign language and algebra. The 
term is entirely lost so far as progress in the school 
is concerned, because all the work must be re- 
peated so as to cover the two subjects failed in. 
Sometimes the rules permit a pupil failing in only 
118 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

one subject to go ahead with his class and carry 
the failed subject as a condition. This is nearly 
as disastrous as the other dilemma, for a contin- 
uous subject inevitably requires mastery of the 
fundamental principles as a foundation for the 
more advanced work. This expedient results 
only in the pupil's dragging an ever-lengthening 
chain of failure which ultimately requires the 
extra term or perhaps more frequently sends him 
disheartened from the school. 

Many curious complications arise under this 
system that would be amusing if they were not 
so tragic. A grammar school boy had passed in 
every subject for admission to high school save 
"reading." For "reading" he received a mark of 
45 per cent. The boy stuttered under excitement. 
He stuttered at the unnatural test of reading a 
paragraph before strangers in a strange school. 
As 50 per cent was essential in "reading," the 
45 per cent kept the boy out of the high school. 
He was too much discouraged to spend another 
year doing geography, history, spelling, gram- 
mar, music, physiology, mensuration, percent- 
age, and denominate numbers, all of which he 
had at his fingers' ends. Besides, he was not sure 
at all that a repetition of these studies would 
cure his occasional tendency to stutter. 
119 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

B — — was a student in a school that 



perhaps more than any other in the country 
prides itself on its traditions. A teacher of Eng- 
lish was amazed by the perfection of the boy's 
knowledge of every detail of his work. His com- 
positions were so good that the teacher envied 
his skill. He had never failed in English, but 
evidently was going on the principle, — if at 
first you do succeed, try, try again. Investiga- 
tion showed that in his first trial he had failed 
seven hours' work, the second time over his 
freshman course he had passed the work failed 
at first, but, because of the tediousness of mark- 
ing time over ground once traversed, had failed 
seven hours that he had passed the first time. 
So, because he had failed to make all his hits at 
one inning, he was compelled to spend a third 
year in the freshman class. At seventeen he was 
classified with boys of thirteen and fourteen. Of 
course, he was tired of the "same old stuff," as 
he expressed it, so he found a job. The records 
of many schools would show hundreds of dis- 
gusting parallels to these cases. They are striking 
examples of the letter of the law that killeth. 

Another evil of this system, quite as great 
though not so apparent, is the inevitable rigid- 
ity of the course. The school may offer, for 
1 20 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

example, four courses of study. Pupils are 
grouped in sections by grades in each term of the 
course. It becomes nearly impossible to permit 
any combinations from the various courses or to 
make the load lighter or heavier to meet individ- 
ual needs and capacities. The thirty-five pupils 
of a section must lock-step together from the 
first day of the term to the end thereof, and the 
pedagogic beadle must chastise any obstreperous 
youngster who cries for more or less or different. 

Promotion by subject, of course, requires a 
more complicated organization. It occasionally 
— though seldom — makes it impossible to give 
a pupil at a certain time just the subjects that 
seem most desirable. It sets a difficult problem 
in permutations to be worked out by the princi- 
pal and teachers, but the very task of working 
out this problem is sure to bring them into inti- 
mate and vital contact with the boys and girls 
and their real needs. Moreover, it can be done, 
as is proved by thousands of schools all over the 
country; and any principal who really wants to 
serve his community will have little difficulty 
in readjusting his administration on the more 
democratic basis. 

Problems of adjusting the course of study will 
arise in very great variety in any high school. 
121 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

The importance of a liberal spirit in their admin- 
istration may be emphasized by a few illustra- 
tions from actual experience. 

Mary X was a bright pupil in the majority 

of her subjects, but like many other bright girls 
she found geometry an insurmountable barrier. 
She studied honestly and diligently, her teachers 
patiently go-carted her from "two right lines' ' to 
Q.E.D., but Mary was more dense than the old 
German who tried to understand the use of 
clearing-house certificates in time of a panic. 
After repeated explanations and vain repetitions, 
a light dawned upon his broad face and he 
exclaimed, "It is like dis, ven mine baby vakes 
up in der night und gries for milk, I shust gif 
him a milk dicket." 

Problem i: Shall this girl be tortured with 
geometry as long as she remains in school (which 
under these conditions probably will not be 
long), or shall she be permitted to drop geometry 
and make up her counts for graduation by taking 
subjects she can master with profit? 

John Y — — failed in first-term Latin for five 
successive terms. In this time the habit of failure 
came to include nearly all of his studies and 
became chronic, along with the cigarette habit, 
the hands-in-the-pockets habit, the stand-on- 
122 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

the-corner habit, and several other highly unde- 
sirable habits. Every one knew that John had 
plenty of ability to conquer Latin or any other 
subject that he really wanted to conquer. 

Problem 2 : Did the school do right in keeping 
John at subjects that he refused to study, or 
should it have sought his interests, and at least 
have tried to develop the habit of success? See 
Johann Friedrich Herbart. 

Nellie Z possessed some talent and much 

love for music. It was accepted as a matter of 
fact in her home that she should have a thorough 
musical education. She took two lessons a week 
and practiced three hours a day. 

Problem 3 : Should the public high school per- 
mit her to take less than the full course and so 
be graduated in five or six instead of in four 
years? 

Problem 4: Should the public high school ex- 
cuse Nellie an hour before the close of school on 
Thursday to attend a class in the theory of 
music, which she could attend only at that time? 

Harry W was the son of a prominent 

physician who had determined that the boy 
should follow his father's practice. Harry was 
obedient and dutiful, prepared his lessons in the 
college preparatory course passably well, and 
123 



DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL 

spent every spare moment working with machin- 
ery. His skill and ingenuity in all kinds of 
mechanical processes amounted almost to genius. 
His hatred for languages and for textbook theory 
was overcome only by the coercion of a strong 
father who had managed to keep in touch with 
the boy. 

Problem 5: (a) Should the school have tried 
to convince the father that Harry's greatest use- 
fulness lay along mechanical lines? (b) If suc- 
cessful, should the school have changed Harry's 
course so as to emphasize mechanics, manual 
training, and mathematics? 

Problem 6: If William A and Mary B— 

will not or cannot do any certain kind of school 
work, shall they be held to the traditional course, 
or shall their needs be studied, and the course 
adapted to meet those needs? 

Problem 7 : Shall the high school put all fresh- 
men through a perscribed course, or shall it so 
coordinate with the grammar school as to profit 
by the latter's knowledge of the individual, and 
shape the pupil's course in accord with this knowl- 
edge from the time he enters the high school? 

Problems like the above with a thousand indi- 
vidual variations will arise from day to day in 
the administration of a high school. The manner 
124 



THE COURSE OF STUDY 

of their solution will depend upon the conscious 
or subconscious belief of the high-school principal 
and teachers as to the nature and ends of educa- 
tion and their conception of the obligations of the 
school to the community that is paying the bills. 



OUTLINE 

I. A SOCIAL VIEW OF THE HIGH SCHOOL 

i. The increasing dissatisfaction with the high 

school x 

2. Its civic inefficiency J 

3. Its pedagogical shortcomings 2 

4. The high school as a cooperative agency for 
social service • ■ 5 

<. Its two chief ways of training in right social 
thinking ° 

a. Through the curriculum 6 

(1) The use of present day social, political, 
and economic knowledge 6 

(2) The study of history from the modern 
social point of view IO 

b. Through participation in the management of 
the school as a social unit *3 

(1) The abolition of snobbish societies as the 
wrong kind of training 13 

(2) School discipline as a daily object lesson 

in social cooperation *5 

(3) The spirit of democracy in the organiza- 
tion of student activities *7 

6. The need of diversity of opportunity in studies 19 
a. Our education is through-scheduled for the 

professions , 2 ° 

127 



OUTLINE 

b. It should be less exclusively bookish and 
academic 24 

c. The colleges enforce a course of study fitted 
only for the few 25 



II. THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE BOY 

1. The school's responsibility for the school loafer. 28 

2. There is no real antagonism between the old 
education and the new 29 

3. The respective services of the old school and the 
new 30 

4. The changed clientage of the high school 30 

5. Its function to train all for citizenship rather than 

a few for leadership 31 

6. Bridging the gap between the grammar and the 
high school 33 

7. Holding the unintellectual boy 37 

8. Serving those who must soon go to work 41 

9. Equalizing high school subjects 42 

III. THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE GIRL 

1. Girls follow a curriculum originally made for 
boys 51 

2. What society and the girl require of the high 
school. 51 

a. Provision for physical health 52 

b. Education for efficient home-making 60 

c. Training for a wage earning occupation 71 

128 



OUTLINE 

d. Development of the larger interests of full and 
complete living 76 

3. The course of study must be adaptable to indi- 
vidual needs 77 

4. The school must be socially democratic 77 



IV. THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE 

1 . The controversy between the high school and the 
college 80 

2. The incubus of college domination 81 

3. College-entrance requirements restrict the range 

of the high-school course 82 

4. They limit the methods of teaching employed . . 89 

5. The case of science 90 

6. Mathematics 93 

7. Languages 97 

8. History 98 

9. English 98 

10. Rights that the college must grant to the high 

school 108 



V. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE COURSE 
OF STUDY 

1. The spirit of school administration as an expres- 
sion of real service 109 

2. The problem of required studies no 

a. The traditional requirement of algebra and 

foreign languages no 

129 



OUTLINE 

b. Social science, English and physical training 

as a new basis in 

c. Household arts as an additional requirement 

for girls 112 

d. Manual arts as an additional requirement for 
boys 113 

3. The need of thorough courses of four or five hours 
per week 114 

4. The problem of elective studies 115 

5. The method of promoting by subjects 118 

6. Some special problems in adapting the course of 
study 121 



RIVERSIDE EDUCATIONAL 
MONOGRAPHS 

GENERAL EDUCATIONAL THEORY 

Dewey's MORAL PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION 35 

Eliot's EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 35 

Eliot's tendency to tee concrete and practical in mod- 
ern EDUCATION 3B 

Emerson's EDUCATION 35 

Fiske's THE MEANING OF INFANCY 35 

Hyde's THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 35 

Palmer's THE IDEAL TEACHER 35 

Prosser's THE TEACHER AND OLD AGE 60 

Terman's THE TEACHER'S HEALTH 60 

Thorndike's INDIVIDUALITY 35 

ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS 

Betts's NEW IDEALS IN RURAL SCHOOLS 60 

Bloomfield's VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE OF YOUTH 60 

Cabot's VOLUNTEER HELP TO THE SCHOOLS 60 

Cole's INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 35 

Cubberley's CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 35 

Ccbberley's THE IMPROVEMENT OF RURAL SCHOOLS 35 

Lewis's DEMOCRACY'S HIGH SCHOOL >60 

Perry's STATUS OF THE TEACHER 35 

Snedden's THE PROBLEM OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 35 

Trowbridge's THE HOME SCHOOL .60 

Weeks's THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 60 

METHODS OF TEACHING 

Bailey's ART EDUCATION 60 

Betts's THE RECITATION 60 

Campagnac's THE TEACHING OF COMPOSITION 35 

Cooley's LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE GRADES 35 

Dewey's INTEREST AND EFFORT IN EDUCATION 60 

Earhart's TEACHING CHILDREN TO STUDY 60 

Evans's TEACHING OF HIGH SCHOOL MATHEMATICS 35 

Haliburton" and Smith's TEACHING POETRY IN THE GRADES 60 

Hartwell's THE TEACHING OF HISTORY 35 

Kilpatrick's THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM EXAMINED 35 

Palmer's ETHICAL AND MORAL INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS.. .35 

Palmer's SELF-CULTIVATION IN ENGLISH 35 

Suzzallo's THE TEACHING OF PRIMARY ARITHMETIC 60 

Suzzallo's THE TEACHING OF SPELLING 60 

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